It’s my bday. A round one. I’m spending it in the Croatian Pavilion in Venice, which is my home until December.
It’s my bday. A round one. I’m spending it in the Croatian Pavilion in Venice, which is my home until December.
Tim and I are in Basel to meet folks and have discussions about our new production for Basel Ballet next year. Titled ‘Go with Your Heart,’ the piece will have its premiere on 21 March 2025 followed by 16 performances in March – June. Here we are last night in the lobby of Theatre Basel. đ
Hugo Glendinning has worked with us to make a short introductory video about By the Means at Hand – Croatian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale:
Do visit the website for By the Means at Hand – my project for the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. You can read about the project, watch a short video about it by Hugo Glendinning, see the list of all the participating artists and their works, and download a PDF of our reader, with 12 newly commissioned texts.
Website design: OAZA (MaĆĄa Poljanec). Web development: Nikola Greiner
“Outside the Giardini in the Croatia pavilion, London-based artist Vlatka Horvatâs By the Means at Hand invites numerous artists, none of whom are living in their native countries, to send small artworks by hand, via friends and strangers, to be shown in the pavilion. Horvat responds in an ongoing, reciprocal series of photocollages. The project is all about trust, solidarity, improvisation and generosity, and will evolve over the coming months. The show is an ongoing open conversation, a model of exchange and dialogue we could all do with more of, and one entirely without posturing or grand statements.”
Full article here.
Happy to have had a chance to answer Art Review editors’ questions about my project in Venice:
https://artreview.com/vlatka-horvat-on-representing-croatia-at-the-60th-venice-biennale/
âBy the Means at Hand,â my project for the Croatian Pavilion – La Biennale di Venezia is included among the “unmissable off-site exhibitions in Venice” picked by Frieze magazine editors.
“Over the last few weeks, I have spotted Instagram posts of packages of different shapes and sizes in the hands of various people in different cities, along travel routes documented by airport codes such as LHR and JFK. Here, artist Vlatka Horvat aims to illustrate often informal methods of transporting objects from country to country by those living abroad (the photographs reminded me of the parcels my mother would receive in Ghana for her return to the UK addressed to another relative, therefore avoiding substantial shipping costs). Horvatâs âBy the Means at Handâ will include drawings from over 200 artist friends, transported to Venice via these informal exchanges, and in return Horvat will produce works during her time in Venice to be sent via these same method of using suitcases belonging to friends and strangers alike.” â VANESSA PETERSON, associate editor
Croatian Pavilion is situated in FĂ brica 33, corner of Calle Larga dei Boteri and Calle Ruzzini, Cannaregio 5063 (Vaporetto station Fondamente Nove).
Official opening is on April 19, 3pm. Join us for the opening, and during the pre-opening days: 16th â 19th April from 10am to 7pm.
Invite below!
Our e-flux announcement is out:
First visuals for my project for the Venice Biennale are out:
our Instagram is live: @croatianpavilion2024
our Facebook page is here: Croatian Pavilion – La Biennale di Venezia
and www.croatianpavilion2024.com has a temporary page up, with the full version coming shortly.
Here a few pics of our booth at Artissima 2023:
I’m in Torino this week – just finished installing the booth at Artissima with the lovely Renata and Chiara of Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea. It looks great đ but I failed to take any ‘proper’ pics today.
Here a corner of our booth, with Tim’s work lighting up the walkway, and my works still packed in boxes.
Artissima 2023
November 3-5, 2023
VIP Preview: November 2
Oval Lingotto Fiere, Torino
Booth of Renata Fabbri
Main Section – ORANGE 12
with works by Tim Etchells, Sophie Ko and Vlatka Horvat
On Thursday, 19th October at 6pm, I will be in conversation with Kristina BonjekoviÄ StojkoviÄ, Senior Curator at MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, about my exhibition Good Company, which is on view at the museum until 12th November 2023.
I could not be happier that the amazing Lara Pawson wrote about my To See Stars over Mountains in the recent issue of TLS – Times Literary Supplement, in response to the question; “what art and literature can be, or do, in times of tension, conflict and destructionâ.
Waiting for the hard copy to arrive in the post (or rather waiting to get back to London from Avignon so I can get my post) and in the meantime here’s a cheeky (and apparently very low res!) phone screen grab:
An interview with me by Francesca Pagliuca is out in the new (Summer 2023) issue of arte e critica. âYou canât step in the same river twiceâ – in both English and Italian. Will add a PDF to the press section as soon as I get my hands on a copy!
For now, just a screen grab of the cover and table of contents:
I have just uploaded the images of my new works, made for Coupling: Maarit Mustonen & Vlatka Horvat at PUBLICS in Helsinki. The show is on until 30 June and some documentation is on these pages:
Coupling – show documentation
Reinforcements – new version of my 2016 installation, always made in situ with locally sourced materials
New Concertina pieces in Stitched Works on Paper
Views (Remembered) – an experimental publication in the form of text decals on windows
I love this image I took through the window of the spaces inside and outside PUBLICS merging:
My work Ladder (I), 2009 is included in The Book of Ladders: 100 Contemporary Artworks by Adeline de Monseignat and Paul Carey-Kent.
The piece was made for, and first shown in, my solo show ‘Or Some Other Time’ at the Kitchen in NYC, curated by Matthew Lyons. Install images of the show are here.
A great text by Giovanna Manzotti on Tim Etchells’s and my show at Renata Fabri in Milano in Mousse Magazine.
Happy to announce that Tim Etchells and I are doing a 2-person show at Renata Fabbri in Milano, opening 29 March. The show, titled Same River Twice, will run until 3 June 2023 – put it on your list if you are coming to Milano for MiArt in April…
From the press release:
Stemming from a long-lasting collaboration between the two artists â both work and life partners â the show is structured as a close dialogue between Horvatâs new sculptural works and works on paper and Etchellsâs new neon pieces.
Linked by their reciprocal interest in the processes of repetition and in the exploration of structures that both produce and eschew variation, the artists employ a range of different media, such as sculpture, performance, writing, drawing, photography and video. The title of the exhibition, Same River Twice, is a fragment of the expression âYou canât step in the same river twiceâ and speaks to Horvat and Etchellsâs shared preoccupation with ideas around change, transformation and instability. It also evokes the flow and movement of nature, bodies, time and language, explored in different ways by the works on show.
Through the interaction of various materials, such as paper, textiles, ceramic, wood and cork, Horvatâs sculptural works refer to gestures of holding, joining and cradling and raise questions around protection, containment and mobility. In several of the works on paper she reworks the page as an object, dismantling and repairing it while materially recording the passing of time. Etchellsâs new neon pieces extend his ongoing work on contradictory aspects of language, drawing attention to the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and its simultaneous propensity to create rich fields of uncertainty and ambiguity.
The show will run until 3 June 2023.
This past week I’ve been in Milano, working with the amazing master ceramicist Massimiliano Pipolo in his Fornace Ceramics Lab.
Massimiliano is an incredible maker, expert technician and teacher and I had the best time working alongside him and his studio assistant Claudia on some new ceramic pieces that will form a part of a new body of work loosely based on the phases of the moon.
This new series is one of several new pieces I’ve been busy making for my upcoming show at Renata Fabbri in Milan. The show, titled Same River Twice, is a two-person exhibition with the most wonderful Tim Etchells đ opening on 29th March.
The pieces are now in the drying stage… Looking forward to going back to Milano in a couple of weeks.
Tomorrow! Friday, 10 June at 6pm at the ICA London:
Iâm convening the opening session of Choreographic Devices – a 3-day symposium developed by Murat Adash, Ofri Cnaani, and Edgar Schmitz, in dialogue with the ICA.
For my session I will be joined by 7 other artists looking at instances of dysfunctional spatial (and social) relations – in art and in life.
With these wonderful people: Augusto Corrieri, Critical Interruptions (Diana Damian Martin & Bojana JankoviÄ), Edwina Ashton, Florian Roithmayr, Harun Morrison, Lara Pawson, Rebecca Moss.
—
Around Apart Under Behind Through Ahead: A Partial Lexicon of Spatial Dysfunction
(Vlatka Horvat and invited guests)
Focused on rethinking built and social space as an inherently choreographic act, Vlatka Horvat’s A Partial Lexicon of Spatial Dysfunction brings the artist into dialogue with seven invited guests – artists, writers, performance makers – in an event that shifts dynamically between talks, readings, discursive presentations and performative actions. Interrogating the relation between space, objects and human interactions, especially at the point where spatial relations collapse or transform unexpectedly, Horvatâs unruly reflection on the spatial/choreographic in daily life both performs and at the same time elaborates theoretically on the ways in which normative spatial practice might be reordered to create new social, artistic and political possibilities.
Full symposium programme and booking here.
My solo show at PEER closed recently. Thank you to all who visited, and extra thanks to all who left comments in the gallery book – it was really heartening to read.
Here’s the press roundup:
Interviews
Studio International (link) â Vlatka Horvat in conversation with Veronica Simpson
recessed.space (link) â Vlatka Horvat in conversation with Will Jennings
Reviews
artforum (link) – Review (criticâs pick) by Jonah Goldman Kay
Camera Austria (pdf) – Review by Orit Gat
Era Journal (link) â Reviewby Romilly Schulte
Featured lists
Artforum (link): MUST SEE
FAD magazine (link): The top 5 exhibitions by female artists – Micro feature by Tabish Khan
Evening Standard (link): âCulture in London: the faces to watch in 2022 â Visual artâ – Feature by Ben Luke
a-n newsletter (link): âThis monthâs must-see exhibitions and eventsâ – Feature by Ellen WilkinsonÂ
FAD magazine (link): The top 6 art books to read in spring 2022