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.
.
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
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9 Sept 2019 – 9 Feb 2020
What Time is It?
Curated by Emre Baykal and Eda Berkmen
&
9 Sept 2019 – 8 March 2020
Words Are Very Unnecessary
Curated by Selen AnsenBoth of the above shows are at:Vehbi Koç Foundation – Arter Collection
ARTER, Istanbul, Turkey
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Recent Acquisitions: No Contextual Information
A collaboration with Tim Etchells
Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Several of my works that are in the Arter Collection, a subsidiary of the Vehbi Koç Foundation, are included in the inaugural exhibitions at the new ARTER building, opening its doors on 13th September 2019, with previews on 10/11/12th September.
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9 Sept 2019 – 9 Feb 2020
What Time is It?
Curated by Emre Baykal and Eda Berkmen
A show looking at memory in relation to home, objects, archives, history, archeology, land, borders, migration and representation – includes four works from my The Past is Another Country series.
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9 Sept 2019 – 8 March 2020
Words Are Very Unnecessary
Curated by Selen Ansen
A show revolving around ‘gesture’ and ‘remains’, focusing on works that highlight process-based practices and approaches. Includes several works from my Frame Paintings series.
Both shows are at:
Vehbi Koç Foundation – Arter Collection
ARTER, Istanbul, Turkey
Other shows currently on:
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Until 13 September
I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire
a group show curated by WHW
State of Concept, Athens
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Ongoing
Recent Acquisitions: No Contextual Information
a collaboration with Tim Etchells
Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
I’m in Chicago (2nd time in as many months) working on a new solo performance, Third Hand, which will open on the 4th of June 2019 at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Performances are
June 4th/5th/6th at 7pm
in the Sidney R Yates Gallery, on the 4th floor of the Chicago Cultural Center (Randolph Street side).
No booking required and entrance is free – the piece is supported by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) as part of the exhibition goat island archive – we have discovered the performance by making it.
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More details about the piece are in the Projects section here.
This is the spectacular Yates Gallery where the piece will be performed:
Opening tonight, 17 May at 7.30 at State of Concept in Athens
“I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire”
A group show curated by WHW / What, How and for Whom with some amazing work looking at the figure of the partisan woman – includes my rarely shown video ‘Oaths and Partisan Songs from Memory’ from 2002.
With
Marwa Arsanios, Lela Čermak, Dora Economou, Vlatka Horvat, Yota Ioannidou, Sanja Iveković, Adela Jušić, Gülsün Karamustafa, Rajkamal Kahlon, Theo Prodromidis, Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović, Mujeres Públicas, Želimir Žilnik
State of Concept, Mpotsari Tousa 19, Athina 117 41, Greece
From the press release:
The exhibition “I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire” curated by collective What, How and for Whom / WHW starts from the figure of women partisans in intertwined histories of Yugoslav and Greek anti-fascist struggle and postwar constellation of Cold War. It situates these histories in relation to various liberation and anti-colonial struggles, and a contemporary line of feminist demands for total social alternative. The brave and uncompromising quote in its title is taken from a poem “May 25th” (1978) by poet, actress and militant anarchist Katerina Gogou (1940–93).
The exhibition presents episodes and cases of documentary research along diverse artistic works that look at contributions of women in building an egalitarian and just world system, often lost in dominant heroic narratives of anti-fascist struggles and leftist rhetoric. I’ll open the door straight, dead straight into the fire asks who are the partisan women of today and tries to join various voices and approaches opposing the current conditions of re-traditionalization, enforcement of patriarchy and devastating reproduction of capitalist growth.
Supporting Objects, my recent solo show at Eastwards Prospectus in Bucharest, which was on view 15 December 2018 – 15 February 2019, is reviewed in the April 2019 print issue of Artforum. I’m grateful to Daria Ghiu for a thoughtful reading of my work.
The online version of the print issue requires a password – if you are a subscriber you can read the full review here: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201904/vlatka-horvat-79096
For those who dont subscribe, here’s a jpg:
Documentation of the show can be seen in the Projects section here.
Lots going on at the moment.
I’m in Chicago, on a residency at the Graham Foundation, where I’m working on a new performance which will premiere in June at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Titled Third Hand, the piece is a commission by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) as part of the exhibition goat island archive – we have discovered the performance by making it. The piece will open at the Chicago Cultural Center on 4th June 2019. More info about the project in the Projects section here.
A work-in-progress showing of the piece will be on 4th April 2019 at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago, part of IN>TIME Performance festival.
I’ve been developing the piece with the artist Michael Thomas, a co-founder of the Chicago-based collaborative group Lucky Pierre which makes work across writing, performance, education, activism, and visual forms. Michael and I are will be performing the piece together.
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Meanwhile, several exhibitions featuring my work are opening elsewhere:
15 March – ongoing
Recent Acquisitions: No Contextual Information – a collaboration with Tim Etchells
Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
1 April – 18 May
Loose Ends – a group show (Vlatka Horvat, Istvan Ist Huzjan, Sophie Ko, Dino Zrnec), curated by Branka Bencic
Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea, Milan, Italy
5-7 April
MiArt – booth of Eastwards Prospectus / gaep gallery, Bucharest
My first solo show at Eastwards Prospectus in Bucharest opened this past Saturday and is on until 9th February 2019. Titled Supporting Objects, the show spans both floors of the gallery’s 19th century villa.
It’s a really nice show – even if I say so myself! – happy for such a good way to end the year.
Some images of the show are in the Projects section here.
Vlatka Horvat: Supporting Objects
at Eastwards Prospectus, Bucharest
15 December 2018 – 9 February 2019
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:
