Happy to be in such amazing company in this feature by Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. Link here.
It is absolutely not an overstatement to say that I am thrilled to announce that I will have a solo exhibition at PEER London at the start of next year.
Here’s the announcement from PEER’s website:
PEER presents an exhibition of ambitious new works by Vlatka Horvat. Having exhibited extensively across Europe, USA and further afield, this will be her first solo exhibition in London, where she has lived for more than a decade. Horvat’s practice spans sculpture, installation, video and photography, as well as performance, publications and public interventions. Her work often involves gestures of reconfiguring space and the spatial and inherent social relations at play – exploring the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment, and landscape.
The central element of her exhibition at PEER will be an epic series of 365 A4 works on paper – one produced for every day of 2021. Each is based on a photograph the artist has taken on her daily walk, which she then playfully and radically reimagines using drawing and collage. Titled To See Stars over Mountains, the work will densely occupy the whole of the second gallery space at PEER. The works mirror, amplify, extend, repeat, and morph aspects of the landscape – celebrating the everyday as well as transforming it radically, bringing new eyes and possibilities to urban space.
To See Stars over Mountains will also be presented as an artist book documenting the entire series. The 376-page book, published in collaboration with PEER and Unstable Object, will launch at the opening of the exhibition and will be available to purchase.
Alongside the collages, Horvat will show a new sculptural installation that speaks directly to the street via PEER’s large storefront windows, and a new video produced in 2021.
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So book your calendars!
Vlatka Horvat: By Hand, on Foot
4 February – 2 April 2022
Opening reception and book launch: 3 February 18:00 – 20:00
Head over to PEER for a few more teaser images…
The Domino Effect 2 opened recently at GAEP Gallery in Bucharest. The show is on until 5th February 2022.
This group exhibition brings together 14 works selected by the gallery artists themselves. The gallery invited the artists to choose one work by another artist. With and selected by: Raluca Popa ➟ Sebastian Moldovan ➟ Tania Mouraud ➟ Vlatka Horvat ➟ Felipe Cohen ➟ Ištvan Išt Huzjan ➟ Ignacio Uriarte ➟ Mihai Plătică ➟ Mircea Stănescu ➟ Marilena Preda Sânc ➟ Pavel Brăila ➟ Damir Očko ➟ Răzvan Anton ➟ Radu Cioca.
‘Not Standing in Place’, a project that Tim Etchells and I have been working on for Theater Spektakel festival opened on 18th August in Zurich with a short performance by the two of us.
For the project we invited 14 international artists to propose imaginary monuments in text form, which are manifested as billboards, 3-dimensional constructions, small signs and banners installed across the festival site.
With new works by: Anne Bean, Caroline Bergvall, Season Butler, Tania El Khoury, Sharon Hayes, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, David Horvitz, Peter Liversidge, Harun Morrison, Ahmet Öğüt, Katrina Palmer, Dan Perjovschi, Dread Scott, and Schwar zenbach Kompl ex.
Photos of all 14 pieces are in the Projects section here. Link to the project page on the festival site is here.
If you are in Zurich, we have 6 walking tours of all the monuments over the course of the festival – led by two Zurich-based artists; scientist/artist/DJ Yara Dulac Gisler will be doing them in German and performance maker/musician Phil Hayes in English. Guided tours info and schedule is here.
I’m part of this year’s professorial team for WHW Akademija and I’m doing a ‘thing’ on the 17th as part of WHW Akademija’s online event series.
Here’s the blurb:
In Walking Distance, Vlatka Horvat reflects on a series of projects she undertook during Covid lockdowns from spring 2020 to summer 2021. Diverse in form and ranging from drawings, collages and other kinds of works on paper to video, photography and writing – each of these projects begins with an encounter with local landscape which for Horvat becomes a space for exploration of ideas around presence and absence, proximity and distance, mobility and stuckness, memory and projection.
The presentation Walking Distance adopts a collage-like form, interweaving elements of artist talk, fiction, speculative writing and communal viewing to construct a compelling essay on artistic process, the role of place in the organisation of experience, and the interaction between landscape, perception and imagination.
At the heart of Horvat’s works produced during the last fifteen months is a daily practice which stages a negotiation between the ‘infraordinary’ of everyday life and its counterparts in the realm of the fictional, the speculative and the impossible. The projects featuring in Horvat’s presentation all stem from related processes through which the local geography, quotidian urban spaces and experiences of the pandemic are seen, re-seen and ultimately transformed.
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Realized in cooperation with the project Curating in Context, organized by the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, within the Erasmus+ program.
The program is supported by: Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation, Foundation for Arts Initiatives / European Cultural Foundation / City of Zagreb / Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia / Kultura Nova Foundation
Join on Zoom here or you can watch it livestreamed on WHW Akademija’s FB page here.
After endless pandemic-induced recasting and rethinking, Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done is finally happening!
What was in another reality going to be a live durational performance is now a 25-minute film, made with the fabulous team of Hugo Glendinning (cinematography and editing), John Avery (sound design), Alex Fernandes (production) and Karen Christopher, Tim Etchells, Nicki Hobday and Greg Wohead (performers).
A commissioned production of KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, the film will be available for streaming on demand from this evening 8pm Europe / 7pm UK until 6th June 2021 at
https://dringeblieben.de/videos/until-the-last-of-our-labours-is-done-vlatka-horvat
Below are some production pics. For more info on the film and some film stills, see the project page here.
My Beginnings Marathon piece is happening today at KANAL – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, part of Brussels, City of Stories.
Beginnings Marathon is a durational performance where we read out loud first pages of books to make a collage of beginnings. We are doing the piece a bit differently this time for obvious reasons… opening it up to contributions from a distance. So in addition to coming to KANAL and reading the first page of a book, people can also contribute to the project by sending in a photo of the first page of a book that’s important to them – on any topic, any genre and in any language. Pages sent in from a distance will be read out loud by a group of multilingual performers at KANAL.
Beginnings Marathon is part of the programme surrounding the final weekend of John M. Armleder’s exhibition It Never Ends.
Page One drawing by Tim Etchells.
More info on Beginnings Marathon at KANAL here.
A new short story of mine is published today in Minor Literatures journal.
You can read it on ML here.
Ian Pedigo has written a sharp and generous feature on my work across performance, installation, sculpture and collage.
Read it on ArtPyre here.
Update 03 Dec: On sale now! – Get it at Nightjar Press here.
My short story House Calls is being published by Nightjar Press in their gorgeous limited-edition single-story chapbook series.
Announced earlier this week at Manchester Book Fair, House Calls – together with Like a Fever by Tim Etchells – goes on sale next week on Nightjar Press site.
A group show titled The Domino Effect opening on Saturday, 21 November 2020 at Gaep Gallery in Bucharest. For the show, curated by Tevž Logar, every artist in the gallery programme was invited to choose one work from another artist, in alphabetical order.
From Tevž Logar’s note about the show:
“Although an art gallery serves as a small community comprised of artists, gallerists, curators, collectors and other audiences engaged with art, the exchange between these groups can sometimes seem superficial and limited. That was the starting point for this exhibition, which tries to rethink the commercial gallery as a community and to challenge its programme. Not from the perspective of the gallerist, curator or collector, but from that of the artists themselves, who represent the core and the most important part of the community.
Titled The Domino Effect, the exhibition is the result of an interesting experiment, which gradually selected the artworks through choices made by the artists. A simple structure was applied: every artist in the gallery programme was invited to nominate one work from the following artist, in an alphabetical order. The idea was not to create a mechanism that linked the exhibited artworks, but to stimulate exchanges and connections between artists. In other words, the exhibition dismisses the framework of a classic thematic presentation by rejecting a dominant theme and calling for a break, with the aim of self-reflection.”
With: Răzvan Anton, Pavel Brăila, Radu Cioca, Felipe Cohen, Vlatka Horvat, Ištvan Išt Huzjan, Sebastian Moldovan, Tania Mouraud, Damir Očko, Raluca Popa, Marilena Preda Sânc, Mircea Stănescu, Ignacio Uriarte
My work, Disruption (Scattered Lines), was selected by Felipe Cohen.
Tim Etchells and I are running one of Live Art Development Agency’s DIY peer-to-peer artist development projects, in partnership with Heart of Glass in St Helens, Merseyside.
A Way Away uses the old-school postal correspondence course model to explore ideas around distance – spatial and temporal, physical and social, imagined and real.
Open to artists working in any discipline, at any stage, from any generation, based anywhere in the UK where Royal Mail can reach you.
Deadline: 13 Dec 11.59 pm
Apply here:
Very happy to have been invited to make one of 10 election scores for ‘1000 Scores’ project. Co-commissioned by 1000 Scores, Goethe-Institut Chicago and PACT Zollverein and launched today as an US election special (good luck to us all).
You can see my score, and those of many other artists in this growing archive at www.1000scores.com
1000 Scores – Pieces for Here, Now & Later is a project by Helgard Haug, David Helbich & Cornelius Puschke featuring new instructional pieces by various artists. It is produced by Rimini Apparat, and co-produced by PACT Zollverein, Tanz im August / HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Goethe Institut/Federal Foreign Office of Germany and KANAL – Centre Pompidou.
My work and words are included in two new books that came out during the lockdown.
Invisible Wounds: Negotiating Post-Traumatic Landscapes, edited by Emily-Rose Baker & Amanda Crawley Jackson and published by The University of Sheffield and Museums Sheffield, includes a chapter on my work. Titled Something Former, it’s a conversation between Goran Vodicka and myself, talking about my works The Past Is Another Country; With the Sky on Their Shoulders; Up in Arms; After Tito, Tito; and Who Come to Stand.
The second publication is Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 by Maja and Reuben Fawkes, published by Thames & Hudson. This new survey, part of T&H World of Art series, charts the rich and varied artistic practices from across Central and Eastern Europe from the period after World War II to the (more or less) present day. The chapter covering the 2010s includes my work Balance Beam.
A proposal by Tim Etchells and me for The High Line Plinth is amongst the 80 artists’ proposals being considered for the third and fourth High Line Plinth commissions.Very happy to have had the chance to propose an idea for this incredible site.
All the proposals can be see here:
https://www.thehighline.org/plinth-proposals/
And a direct link to our one is here:
https://www.thehighline.org/art/projects/tim-etchells-vlatka-horvat/
Curator Tevž Logar and I had a chat on GAEP Gallery‘s FB channel about the lockdown, about presence and distance, about Instagram and images, about makeshift constructions and provisional stability, and a few other things!
Or if you prefer to view it on vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/443294754
Gaep gallery’s online exhibition – Resilience Test: Vlatka Horvat – is live now here. It will be available until 9 August.
Resilience Test: Vlatka Horvat the second in a series of three online presentations – alongside those by Marilena Preda Sânc and Ištvan Išt Huzjan – focused around the three artists’ shared interest in the limits of the body, its vulnerability and its resilience.
Works of mine featured are Unhinged (2010), Monuments (2018), Balance Beam #0320 (2020) and Hybrids (2008)
The book Tim Etchells and I have been working on for the last 2 months is now on sale (yey!)
Published as a PDF book, it’s available to buy on a pay-what-you-choose basis, with 100% of proceeds to be donated to the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity.
If you are able to, please consider buying the book and help us raise funds for this (unfortunately) important cause.
Full details below.
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Seen from Here
Writing in the Lockdown
Edited by Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat
Design: David Caines
Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is a collection of stories, flash fiction, poems, autofiction and conceptual writing gathered during the April and May Covid-19 lockdown, bringing together UK-based writers, poets, performance makers and artists.
Published in a PDF format by Unstable Object, an imprint launched by Etchells and Horvat for this occasion, the book is available to buy on a pay-what-you-choose basis, with 100% of proceeds to be donated to the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity.
The writing in Seen from Here is extremely diverse – spanning enigmatic fiction, poetry, powerful autofiction, prescient language artworks and compelling performance texts. While some of the work reflects directly or indirectly on the lockdown experience and the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, other pieces offer glimpses of past events, other realities and fictional landscapes. All but one of the texts included in the collection are previously unpublished and most are newly written, emerging from the isolating state of the lockdown to form a hallucinatory portrait of the concerns, intimate realities and fragile fantasies of the UK in the pandemic zone of 2020.
According to the Trussell Trust website, the period since the start of the pandemic (from the last two weeks of March), has been ‘its network’s busiest ever period, with 81% more emergency food parcels being given out across the UK, including 122% more parcels going to children, compared to the same period in 2019.’
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Contributors: Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Caroline Bergvall, Aisha Mango Borja, Season Butler, Hester Chillingworth, Augusto Corrieri, Will Eaves, Tim Etchells, Rachel Genn, Chris Goode, M. John Harrison, Vlatka Horvat, Wendy Houstoun, Sophie Jung, Andrea Mason, Harun Morrison, Courttia Newland, Katharine Norbury, Lara Pawson, Deborah Pearson, Fernando Sdrigotti, Maria Sledmere, Marvin Thompson, Selina Thompson, Rupert Thomson, Chris Thorpe, Tony White, Eley Williams, Aaron Williamson, Jacob Wren.
Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is available to buy from the online bookshop Unbound, a Live Art Development Agency initiative.
ON SALE now at: https://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/products/seen-from-here
Silvia Costa and I talked about ways of going forward for KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen’s ‘They Havent Met Before’ conversation series:
Kunsthalle Wien is doing weekly podcasts with artists whose work is in the exhibition “… of bread, wine, cars, security and peace,” which had to close a couple of days after it had opened… The good news is that the museum (and the show) will reopen on 29 May and stay up until October.
Here is yesterday’s podcast with me talking about my new sculptural works I made for the show:
https://soundcloud.com/kunsthallewien/kunsthalle-wien-podcast-vlatka-horvat-in-conversation
The recording is from a walk-through we did in the museum on 7 March, just before the lockdown started in Vienna. Kunsthalle Wien space is massive and there were lots of people in attendance, which is why I’m projecting too too much for a podcast!
The documentation of the pieces I’m talking about can be seen here.
And here is a video version of the same interview:
Head over to @KunsthalleWien Instagram every day this week (6-12 April 2020) for a guest post by me; and in subsequent weeks for posts by other artists from the exhibition “…of bread, wine, cars, security and peace” which sadly had to close right after it opened.
My Monday caroussel is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-o35Biixz6/
I’ve added some pics of the new works I made for …of bread, wine, cars, security and peace at Kunsthalle Wien, which opened on 8th March 2020. You can see more images here.
I’ve been in Vienna since last week, making new work for a show at Kunsthalle Vienna, which opens on Sunday, 8th March. It’s been super intense and I have one more day left of installing. Will post more info and pics after it’s all done!
In the meantime, here’s an invite for the opening:
For Infinite Distance, 2011 and Overhang Table, 2018 – amongst works of mine shown by GAEP Gallery at ARCOmadrid, opening tomorrow. Come visit us in Booth 9F16.
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ARCOmadrid 2020
26th February – 1st March
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GAEP Gallery, Booth 9F16
with
Felipe Cohen, Vlatka Horvat, Marilena Preda Sanc, Ignacio Uriarte
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Here’s a preview:
https://www.artsy.net/show/gaep-gaep-at-arcomadrid-2020
