updates

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.
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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

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.

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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:

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

I’m taking part in Strong Language, part of Off the Shelf festival in Sheffield. Curated by Tim Etchells, Strong Language takes place over three days – 12-14 October – and includes readings, performances, projections, installations, and discussions by and with a fantastic group of writers, artists, and publishers.

Last night at Site Gallery, I read a new short story of mine, alongside readings from Tim, M John Harrison, Courttia Newland and Tony White. Alongside the live events, my new work In Eyes and Hands – a series of text projections – is being projected large scale onto the side of Sheffield’s Graves Gallery on Tudor Square. The work is on 8-10pm.

In Eyes and Hands summons human experiences, conditions, and states of mind via a collection of commonplace idioms featuring objects, animals, and elements of nature placed inside, on top of, or around, various parts of the human body. Creating a picture of humanity that shifts between the comical, the grotesque, and the poetic, the text is a surprising and playful compendium that moves from ’time on your hands’ and ‘frog in your throat’ to ‘hat in your hand’ and ‘wool over your eyes.’ As the work unfolds, the phrases are remixed to create a nonsensical list of images which re-imagine the body and its relation to the physical world.

Here are some phone pics from last night: