Blog Archives

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.

Info on joining via Zoom is 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.

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.

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:

https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/opportunities/diy-2020-tim-etchells-and-vlatka-horvat-a-way-away-correspondence-course/

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

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.

—
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.’

—
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.

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.
.
ARCOmadrid 2020
26th February – 1st March
.
GAEP Gallery, Booth 9F16
with
Felipe Cohen, Vlatka Horvat, Marilena Preda Sanc, Ignacio Uriarte
.
Here’s a preview:
https://www.artsy.net/show/gaep-gaep-at-arcomadrid-2020

Tonight at 6pm Tim Etchells and I are doing a talk at Millennium Gallery in Sheffield about our collaborative work No Contextual Information – a series of 35 photos which is now in the permanent collection of Museums Sheffield.
Part of Art Talks with Art Fund.

The brochure for Kunstfestspiele Herrenhausen festival arrived in the post yesterday, which makes it very real that this is happening!

Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done, my durational performance commissioned by the festival, will premiere on 22 May 2020, 6-10pm in the incredible 70m-long baroque gallery on the grounds of Hannover’s Herrenhausen royal gardens.

Here’s the press blurb:

In Vlatka Horvat’s Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done, a group of six performers travel back and forth on a long narrow track, negotiating a landscape of detritus, wooden planks, sticks, fabric scraps, and various broken objects.

Part comical relay race, part surreal lo-fi physics experiment, and part obstacle course, the piece ebbs and flows through the four hours of its duration, the performers’ journeys at times aided, and at other times hindered by the objects and materials they carry with them.
 
Set to a live improvised musical score that augments and contradicts the rhythms of the performance itself, Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done is an unruly choreography of fabulous inventiveness, humour and play, with occasional glimpses of violence – a melee of objects and bodies dragging, pulling, sliding, and jumping.

The performers’ movement shifts between being energetic and competitive, and being reluctant or even resigned. They keep moving forward nonetheless, then return to their starting line again, determined to fight on and start over in a different way. Through the course of this game – with its rules warping, changing and disintegrating over time – both the performers’ moving bodies and the objects they work with are revealed in a new light. Indeed, as the performers continually reinvent both their journeys and their relation to the items they use, a sense of radical imagination is always at hand, through which everyday objects and materials are temporarily transformed into vehicles, props, crutches, vessels, shoes, attachments for the body and even additional body parts.

In its determined exploration of progress and stuckness, persistence and creativity, Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done speaks of human perseverance and resilience, of the need to start over, and of the drive people feel to keep going against all odds. Invoking the liberatory potential and the sheer exhaustion inherent in human movement, the work offers hints of historical dance marathons, echoes of the processes of migration and displacement, and a sense – underneath everything – of a human impulse to keep moving just to stay alive.

—
Credits:

Conceived and directed by Vlatka Horvat

Created with and performed by: Seke Chimutengwende, Neil Callaghan, Wendy Houstoun, Paul Hughes, Lucy Suggate, Rohanne Udall

Live music: Hahn Rowe

A commission and co-production by KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen Hannover
A production of Vlatka Horvat / unstable objects

Here are the shows I’m currently in:

—
10 Dec – 23 Dec 2019
I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire
Curated by WHW
Galerija Nova, Zagreb, Croati