Blog Archives

Tim and I are in Berlin for the opening of Tim’s exhibition at Ebensperger tonight.

The show features Tim’s new and new-ish works in neon, LED/steel, drawing and video – and includes also some work of mine, including a few videos that the two of us made together.

The opening is tonight, 1 Dec 2023, 6-9pm at Ebensperger’s incredible new space in the Fichtebunker, Fichtestrasse 6, 10967 Berlin.

From the press release:

“Lost Your Way” is Tim Etchells’ fourth solo project with Ebensperger. The exhibition comprises the eponymous new neon work alongside several works on paper, videos and a large piece made with steel letters and LEDs . Enough is a set of 14 new monotypes. The video Eyes Looking shows a series of short phrases spelled out in letters made of ice which dissolve to water, the words turning repeatedly to pattern shape and reflection. The piece was first shown across Times Square in 2016, the different phrases appearing in dialogue with each other creating unexpected variations scramblings and re-imaginings of the body and its activities: Eyes Touching, Hands Walking, Blood Listening, Ears Looking.

Installed in the main space at Ebensperger, In the Trees is a large-scale sculpture with steel letter-forms and LED bulbs, originally commissioned for Lichtparcours Braunschweig  2020. The full text reads “The sound you are frightened of is only the wind in the trees”. Conceived as a spatial intervention and as a poetic text work, the sculpture operates in the tension between its invocation of fear and its offer of reassurance, the speculative presence and simultaneous absence or denial of a threat. What might the sound referenced the work be? Who is the “you” that is frightened? And who is the speaker? Can its generic form of reassurance be trusted? Whilst resonating with the built environment and historical context of its installation context at Ebensperger’s new location in a former bunker and bomb shelter – the work at the same time gestures evocatively to broader questions including cultural and political anxieties arising from climate change.

“Lost Your Way” also presents a selection of collaborative video works by Tim Etchells and the artist Vlatka Horvat from between 2001 and 2021, shown here together for the first time: Table Animals and Insults and Praises are shown here alongside Horvat’s Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done in which Etchells performs, and Down Time, one of Etchells’ earliest and best-known video works.

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More info about the show on the gallery website here.

My project titled By the Means at Hand has been selected to represent Croatia at next year’s Venice Biennale. (yeyyyyy!!)

My show, Good Company, opens on Thursday, 14 September at 7pm at MSU Zagreb – Museum of Contemporary Art. The show will be on until 12 November 2023.

Good Company is part of “Triggers”, a cycle of exhibitions in which invited artists engage in a dialogue with works from the museum collection.

“Triggers” / Collection as a Verb
Vlatka Horvat: Good Company

Opening 14/09/2023
Until 12/11/2023

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Vlatka Horvat’s exhibition, Good Company, presents a selection of works from the Sculpture collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art through the lens of the artist’s own practice. Comprising an experimental wall-based publication that uses reference images of works from the museum’s database alongside a cacophonous assembly of sculptures in the room, the exhibition places pieces from different eras and artistic movements into dialogue with one another and with Horvat’s own drawings and sculptural interventions. Good Company stages a playful temporary meeting of works at the border between representation and abstraction, linking works through their visual equivalencies and contrasts to reflect on modes of organisation and categorisation.

More info on MSU site: here
Documentation images on in my project section here.

Happy to be showing my work What Remains in a show titled Constellations at Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art in Vodnjan. Constellations marks Apoteka’s tenth bday, bringing together a selection of artists who have exhibited in the gallery over the past decade.

What Remains consists of a stack of paper, each stamped with a red stamp that says WHAT REMAINS. Visitors are invited to take away a sheet of paper from the top of the pile so the stack that remains in the gallery gradually gets smaller and smaller. Through a certain literalness, the work speaks of the process of slow disappearance and vanishing. The stamped phrase can be read both as a description of what is happening to the gradually shrinking stack over time, as well as a truncated question, posed more broadly: a question about presence, about the traces – material and immaterial – we leave behind in space and in time, a question about memory, about change, about going forward while looking back. In Apoteka, What Remains additionally draws attention to the storefront gallery’s former function as a pharmacy, inviting the visitors into an encounter with this particular physical space and its history.

What Remains was first shown in 2008 at White Columns in NYC and at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The stamped stack exhibited in Constellations is literally the remainder of the much bigger stack exhibited in my Temporary Encounters solo show in Apoteka in 2014.

Constellations
Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art, Vodnjan, Croatia
29.07.2023 – 15.09.2023

With: Ben Cain, Jasmina Cibic, Licio Debeljuh, Matija Debeljuh, Igor Eškinja, Petra Feriancova, Alen Floričić, Foam – Maja Kuzmanović & Nik Gaffney, Igor Grubić, Tina Gverović, Ibro Hasanović, Vlatka Horvat, Kristian Kožul, Maja Kuzmanović, Marko Lulić, David Maljković, Damir Očko, Lala Raščić, Dragana Sapanjoš, SofijaSilvia, Mladen Stropnik, Silvo Šarić , Marko Tadić, Dino Zrnec

Very happy to have been invited to show with Maarit Mustonen in the fourth incarnation of Coupling at PUBLICS in Helsinki. Coupling is a series of curatorial projects, collaborations, or pairings, where two artists are introduced to one another for the first time and show together because of some common concerns within their work.

Maarit and my presentation comprises a public event, exhibition and series of window installations. I will show a new incarnation of my site-responsive installation Reinforcements, as well as a new work on paper titled Soft Spine (Concertina). Maarit and I are also collaborating on the new edition of Eurantie Window Publication, an experimental spatial publication Maarit edits with Arja Karhumaa in the Multipöly Room windows in Vallila.

Vlatka Horvat | Maarit Mustonen: Coupling
at PUBLICS, Helsinki, Finland
opening 8 June 2023 until 30 June 2023

Event: 8 June, 5-7pm
Maarit Mustonen and Vlatka Horvat in conversation with Paul O’Neill
Maarit and I will talk about our practices, discussing the various points of connection explored in our joint presentation at PUBLICS.

In 2012 I made a work for the 53rd October Salon in Belgrade called Fenced Off Area. More than a decade later, I decided that the fence/barrier/cordon/spatial divider should become a path/a bridge/a track/ a connecting structure.

Fence (Repurposed) is on view until 1 October, as part of a large group exhibition Vidljive / The Visible Ones, which opened last week at MSU Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The show will tour in 2023 and 2024 to the project partner institutions: MMSU Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, GALUM Fine Art Gallery in Split, MLU Museum of Fine Art in Osijek and UGD Art Gallery Dubrovnik.

Vidljive / The Visible Ones
at MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
18 May – 1 October 2023

My 2012 work ‘Around About’ (‘O oko’ in Croatian/Serbian), which is held in the October Salon Collection in Belgrade, is on view in ‘Unearthing the Collection’ exhibition at Galerija Podroom:

Otkopavanje kolekcije / Unearthing the Collection
Galerija Podroom Belgrade
11 May – 17 June 2023

Curated by Zorana Đaković Minniti, Jane Gligorijević, Vladimir Bjeličić and Siniša Ilić.

The work was originally a commission for GOOD LIFE, the 53rd October Salon 2012, part of a larger 3-room installation in the spectacular former Geozavod building in Belgrade, curated by Branko Dimitrijević and Mika Hannula. Images of the full installation are here.

If you find yourself in Zurich, please come to the opening of

Vlatka Horvat – Simon Callery

Opening: 14 April 2023, 6 – 8 pm
15 April – 20 May 2023

The show is ready! Tim and I have been in Milan the last 5 days installing. Very excited about the show, which has been a labour of love (they always are 🙂 but this one in particular!). The opening is tonight 6-9; please join us if you’re near.

I will post some images here soon.

For now, just a few teaser pics from the last day of installing – with Lola the dog being the sweetest little helper.

My solo show, Drawn Close, opened on 28th February at Phoinix in Bratislava. The show will be up until 7th April. The show features new works in textiles, sculpture and photography, all made especially for the occasion.

More info plus images of the work are on the show’s page here.

I’m in Bratislava, working on a solo show which opens tomorrow, 28 Feb 2023, at Phoinix, a gallery run by the artist Petra Feriancova.

Will post more images and info – for now, a couple of shots from the space while installing.

A text-based work of mine is included in an exhibition in David Horvitz’s garden in LA – David has invited a number of artists to make instructions and scores that visitors can do while visiting the garden.

The garden is next to David’s studio, at 1911 7th Avenue, Los Angeles 90018.

I was in Čačak, Serbia recently for the opening of the 31st Nadežda Petrović Memorial – the Čačak biennial, titled Gestures, Signs of Life, curated by Siniša Ilić and Bojan Djordjev.

I’m presenting two works: my 2021 short film Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done and a new site-responsive installation titled Through and Through, which I was invited to make for the entrance foyer of Nadežda Petrović Art Gallery.

The exhibition is on 1 October – 13 November 2022 in several venues around Čačak.

With works by: BADco, Ben Cain, Bogdan Djukanović, Borjan Grujić, Tina Gverović, Vlatka Horvat, Nadežda Kirćanski, Neda Kovinić, Ivan Kožarić, Siniša Labrović, Stefan Lukić, Ola Maciejewska, Jelena Milićević, Ana Miljanić, Anastasija Pavić, Nadežda Petrović, Katarina Popović, Marko Tirnanić, Vesna Vesić, Uroš Zvizdić

Here is a guided video tour of the show produced by SEEcult.org (in Serbian) – the segment featuring me starts at 14:40