I’m taking part in the 2nd Industrial Art Biennial taking place across several cities and towns in Istria: in Labin, Raša, Pula, Vodnjan, and Rijeka. The biennial – curated by the Zagreb-based curatorial collective WHW – is organized by Labin Art Express XXI, MMSU – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, and the Archaeological Museum of Istria in Pula, and is part of Rijeka European Capital of Culture 2020. Titled On the Shoulders of Fallen Giants, the biennial takes the Istrian peninsula in Croatia as its starting point – a region marked by geographic and historic specificities and a place on the crossroads of empires, from the Greek, Roman, Venetian, Austro-Hungarian, French and Italian, to Yugoslav socialism.

You can read the press release and the full artist list on e-flux (in English) and on the biennial site (in Croatian).

The schedule of openings is as follows:

Thursday 19.07. at 8pm – Apoteka, Vodnjan
Friday, 20.07. at 12noon – Pula
Friday, 20.07. at 6pm – Raša
Friday, 20.07. at 9pm – Labin
Saturday, 21.07. at 8pm – MMSU, Rijeka

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I’m presenting two works: a series of photographs titled Monuments, which will be included in the section of the exhibition at MMSU Rijeka; and an all-day performance titled Who Come to Stand, at the entrance to the shipyard 3.Maj, Liburnijska 3, Rijeka.

The performance will take place on Saturday, 21st July, 12noon-8pm and everyone who wants to take part is welcome to join.

Scroll down for details.

In the 1965 statue at the entrance to the shipyard 3. Maj, a larger-than-life male figure cradles a model ship, watching over it in a gesture of profound attention, care, and pride. The man and the ship – a labourer-as-maker and the thing he made – mark the long-standing relation between people and the sea, humankind’s search for agency over natural forces, and its ability to build machines that conquer distance. Standing tall on the side of the road, with his head partially covered by the crown of a tree, the statue both celebrates and memorialises – and in current context also mourns – the industrial heritage of shipbuilding and seafaring, the work of the port, and the labour of the hands.

Installed on the 20^th anniversary of the liberation of Rijeka, the statue – work of the Rijeka-born sculptor Vinko Matković – stands next to the entrance of the shipyard. In a gesture of solidarity with the statue, artist Vlatka Horvat organises a performance in the form of a vigil, an action of joining the statue’s inanimate figure and standing with him holding other things worthy of being looked after, or celebrated.

Horvat invites artists and residents of Rijeka to join her at the statue, with an object they want to watch over, take care of, or magnify – a work tool perhaps, a personal item, a photograph, an item of clothing, a thing they made. Objects people might choose to hold alongside the man holding the ship might reflect one’s work and pride in work. Or they might speak of personal narrative or social change; they might speak of things lost, of lives lost, of memories that persist, or of hopes for the future. They can be objects of actual importance or significance, or metaphorical / symbolic objects that in some way stand for the thing a person may want to recognise, bring public focus to, or simply mark.

The task of the performance is to gather in a silent action on the side of the road – to stand there with something of personal or social value. A testament to persistence, perseverance, and to not standing down, Who Come to Stand creates a fragile human scale vigil in the shadow of the statue. The action of holding something becomes here a symbolic act of holding onto something – an actual object, an idea it encapsulates, a sentiment it evokes – as a quiet acknowledgment of things that survive; whether in material form, in memory, or in spirit.

 

Practical Notes

• If you want to take part in the performance, you can come any time between 12noon and 8pm, and stay as long as you like.
• Bring an object to hold. Stand facing the road, somewhere alongside the statue of the man with the ship. Use the statue as a model for how to stand and how to hold your object.
• The idea is to not speak to each other during the performance, to approach the action as a chance for contemplation, as a quiet act of commemorating or marking things that are important – things that might be under threat, vanishing or already gone
• The item you bring to hold in the performance can be an object of personal significance to you; or it can be something symbolic or metaphorical that stands for or evokes ideas, feelings, hopes you want to highlight.
• People of all ages are invited to join. Children are welcome.

I have work in several shows that are currently running:

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CUT: Collage in Central and Eastern European Practices at MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art. Zagreb, Croatia.
Curated by Branka Benčić and Tihomir Milovac.
05 June – 14 August 2018

I’m showing works from several series: Hybrids, The Past is Another Country, and Up in Arms.

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Smart Nature at hase29 Space for Contemporary Art. Osnabrück, Germany.
Curated by Michael Kröger, Elisabeth Lumme, and Tim Roßberg.
09 June – 11 August 2018

I’m showing a floor piece titled Always Greener, which was a commission by MARTa Herford Museum in 2016.

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And the Venice Architecture Biennale continues until 25 November 2018.

My work, a series of drawings titled To Still the Eye is part of Cloud Pergola: Architecture of Hospitality, a collaborative project for the Pavilion of Croatia at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition. Venice, Italy.

Some installation images are in the projects section here.

 

I have been working hard on two exciting things coming up this weekend/next week.
(Gods of Schedule Making were not kind to me when planning these two events in the same week…)

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I’m off to Venice tomorrow to install my work for the Croatian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennial, then to Hannover on Friday for a 3-day durational performance, part of KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen festival. And then – bruises and all! – back to Venice for the previews and the opening of the Biennale.

Some info on both projects below.

 

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Venice Architecture Biennale 2018

Cloud Pergola: The Architecture of Hospitality
Pavilion of Croatia at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition

 

Exhibition dates: 26 May 26 – 26 November 2018
Preview: 24 -25 May 2018
Opening: Friday, 25 May, 1.30 PM

Cloud Pergola: The Architecture of Hospitality at the Croatian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 is a collaborative project crossing the boundaries of architecture, art, engineering, robotic fabrication, and computational modelling.

Conceived by the pavilion curator, Bruno Juričić, with curatorial advice from Branka Benčić, Cloud Pergola brings together three distinct propositions: a pergola structure titled Cloud Drawing by Alisa Andrašek in collaboration with Bruno Juričić, a series of acrylic drawings titled To Still the Eye by Vlatka Horvat, and a sound work Ephemeral Garden by Maja Kuzmanović & FoAM.

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About To Still the Eye:

To Still the Eye is a series of drawings made by bare feet immersed in an acrylic wash, as they slide across the surface of paper, leaving a trace of their journey in the form of a straight horizontal line.

Lifted from the floor to the wall, the tracks of the body moving on the firm ground become traces of imaginary movement on the outer edges of the built space. The imprints of the feet on the wall suggest a playful challenge of the body’s relation to space and to gravity, and the line – at once continuous and interrupted with the marks made by the feet falling, touching down, losing balance – appears as an attempt to scale the circumference of the room using the body’s range of movement as a measuring device.

Running around the space as a fence of sorts, the traced line points to the tangible outer boundary of the room, “confirming” the walls’ presence and solidity as a frame and a container for human action. At the same time, the line performs a certain canceling gesture, enacting a perceptual cut in the wall to suggest distances beyond the confines of the built environment. In that sense, the drawings comprising To Still the Eye conjure the horizon, as a physical manifestation of distance, an endpoint destination for the eye, and a metaphor for the future and for a sense of possibility.

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Location of the Croatian Pavilion:

Artiglierie
Arsenale
CAMPIELLO TANA 2169/F
30122 VENEZIA
Italy

The participation of Croatia at the 16^th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia is organized by Moderna Galerija – National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb with financial support provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia. Additional support provided by City of Pula.

 

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This Here and That There – Herrenhäuser Quartet
A performance by Vlatka Horvat at KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen Hannover

Dates: 19 / 20/ 21 May 2018
11am – 7pm daily

Performed by:
Karen Christopher, Noémie Solomon, Season Butler, Vlatka Horvat

 

I have work in three shows opening this month:

I Am the Mouth: Works from The Art Collection Telekom at MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia. Curated by Nathalie Hoyos, Radmila Iva Jankovic and Rainald Schumacher.

19 January – 18 March

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Natural Artifice: Architecture, Photography and the Construction of Reality at The Glass Tank Gallery, Oxford. Curated by Frederik Petersen / Entreentre.

22 January – 23 February

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Borderline Relation at Eastwards Prospectus, Bucharest, Romania. Curated by Tevz Logar.

25 January – 24 March

I just uploaded some pics of my solo show at MSU Zagreb. Titled Extensions, the show is part of the Kožarić Studio “Laboratory for Reviving” exhibition cycle, curated by Radmila Iva Jankovic. The show looks great I think and is on until 25 February.

Here are some details:

“Laboratory for Reviving” exhibition cycle has been held every year since the Kožarić Studio moved from Medulićeva Street to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artists or curators present projects that find an origin, inspiration or a link in the rich holdings of the Kožarić Studio. Always willing to start from the beginning, using dynamic processes of transforming “garbage into gold” and vice versa in order to strip his own works of the aura of untouchability; the artefacts in Kožarić’s Studio often got a chance at a new life.

In the performative gestures of Vlatka Horvat, which are often enacted in situ, through the ever shifting dynamic relations between architecture, the body and objects, but also speaking to a wider context, it will not be difficult to recognize points of connection, even resonance. The works in the exhibition Extensions – as well as many of the artist’s earlier ensembles – were mostly created using rejected, dysfunctional items. “By modifying and adapting these found objects it is as if I’m extending their expiry date, whilst at the same time literally spatially extending or repeating some element of their form, or some aspect of the space they occupy,” says the artist. “I am drawn to the ways in which objects ‘improved’ in this way embody a kind of a paradox – they are extended or enlarged in space, but this process of expansion simultaneously compromises their function, transforming them from usable, ‘useful’ items into puzzling objects caught in the processes of concurrent fragmentation and multiplication.” The purpose of these performative gestures is a transformation that creates a certain tension and activates imaginative processes in multiple directions, both emotional and associative. Objects that were in their former life associated with acts and conditions of ascent, rest, fitting-in and adapting… through these artistic gestures which emphasise some of their key spatial or functional features using a set of witty do-it-yourself strategies, appear here as absurd reminders of an almost existential state of stuckness, marked by an inability to hold on to things or to put them in order, so that we may finally get going, or else, stop.

My show, Surroundings, opened this week at Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea in Milan. It’s on until 20 January 2018.

You can see the documentation here.

And here some words from the press release:

In Surroundings, Vlatka Horvat’s first solo show at Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea, the artist approaches the idea of horizon line as spatial limit and border whilst at the same time exploring its powerful and contradictory metaphorical status as aspirational destination. In works manifested in different forms and media – altered photographic image, collage, sculpture, and fragile site-responsive material interventions – she renders the horizon as an edge of space and visibility, and as a sign or site of future potential and action.

Horvat’s approach begins with a new series of collage works titled End in Sight. In each of them, the artist cuts parts of the image that contain the horizon and relocates them over lone human figures standing in natural landscapes, connecting the cut horizon lines to their counterpart on the other side of the figure. The new, longer horizon line produced via this procedure is no longer interrupted with the presence of the figure, but rather leaves the figures interrupted, obscured or even blanked out. Multiplying and extending the land and sky to “repair” the caesura enacted by human presence, Horvat’s work poses the horizon line as a “replacement” for the eyes; it takes the place of the eyes, rather than being a destination for the eyes. This “takeover” of the landscape upon the human figure further draws attention to the symbiotic relation between the natural setting and living beings inhabiting it, whilst pointing to the problematic aspects of our presence in landscape as well as our “lostness” in it.

A similar contradiction lies at the heart of At Some Length, a fragile sculptural intervention which Horvat uses to connect the front and back spaces of the upstairs gallery. Made from scraps of string and elastic knotted together to form a single line, the work follows the path of the existing walls of the room, a frail marking of – and on – an already existing solid spatial barrier. Ambiguous in purpose and intention, Horvat’s intervention is at the same time an improvised measure of the space and a rudimentary territorial marking or fence reminiscent of barbed wire – however materially inadequate for that purpose. It is also a simple dividing line, separating the room into what lies above and below this temporary division – a crude landscape drawing conjuring spatial expanse and distance on the walls of the gallery.

In the other collage works in the show – grouped under the name Tree Line – Horvat intervenes repeatedly on an image depicting trees at a waterline of a lake, their forms reflected perfectly in water below. This uncanny already doubled horizon line is subjected to a series of diverse interventions which at time emphasize and at other times obscure or render illegible the strip of the horizon.

The procedure of using the line as both a means of connecting and of separating is used again in the set of two sculptural works titled Set Right in which Horvat first cuts up wooden tables, removing certain parts from them – the table top in one instance and a leg in another – and then performs the gesture of “repairing” the missing parts of these objects with cardboard strips – once again using a temporary material, decidedly inadequate for the job. In this process the tables are altered from functional everyday objects into non-utilitarian ones. The line used to “repair” or complete them creates here a field of action that is simultaneously material and imaginary, as the lines extend, re-frame and re-imagine the tables as hollow 3-dimensional line drawings in space, marking out the boundaries of newly created enterable spaces.

Throughout Surroundings Horvat works and reworks the line as a compositional element central to framing and making readable human presence in space, approaching the line both as a means of tracing our presence and as a trace left by our presence. In addition to the compositional significance of the line – its function to delineate space, demarcate limits and boundaries, and trace trajectories – the show also focuses on the line as a common metaphor for continuity, infinity and distance and as a sign of future, of possibility, and of the end.

Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea is showing a bunch of my work at artissima in Torino this week, alongside Goldschmied & Chiari. Both of our works shown at the fair are in different ways circling around disappearances, illusions, and attempts at magic.

Here are the details:

artissima 2017
Main Section
Hall: Pink B – 
Stand n°6

OVAL Lingotto Fiere
via Giacomo Mattè Trucco 70
10126 Torino
, Italy

The image above is from a new series of collages, titled Vanishing Acts, which enact rather crude interventions upon the pages of an 1897 Victorian book divulging secrets of magic.

I have work in a couple of exhibitions opening in the next few days.

Opening on 19 September at The Showroom in London, Everything we see could also be otherwise (My sweet little lamb…) features some seminal historical pieces by artists from Central, Eastern and South-East Europe from the Vienna-based Kontakt Art Collection and puts them in a dialogue with other historical and contemporary work. The show is the epilogue of a project curated by What, How & for Whom/WHW in collaboration with Kathrin Rhomberg, which unfolded in Zagreb between November 2016 and May 2017.

With work by: Geta Brătescu, Lutz Becker, Josef Dabernig, Nika Dubrovsky, Tim Etchells, VALIE EXPORT, Stano Filko, Marcus Geiger, Tomislav Gotovac, Vlatka Horvat, Sanja Iveković, Běla Kolářová, Július Koller, Jiří Kovanda, KwieKulik, Katalin Ladik, Dora Maurer, Oscar Murillo, David Maljković, Paul Neagu, Neša Paripović, Ewa Partum, Manuel Pelmuş, Cora Pongracz, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Mladen Stilinović, Petr Štembera, Goran Trbuljak, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Stephen Willats.

I’m showing a new version of my piece Reinforcements plus a selection of collages from the series The Past Is Another Country and With the Sky on Their Shoulders.

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And on 15 September at Galerija Galzenica in Velika Gorica, a show titled Temporary Encounters presents selection of the work previously exhibited at apoteka space for contemporary art in Vodnjan, Istria, curated by Branka Benčić.

With work by: Jasmina Cibic, Igor Eskinja, Petra Feriancova, Tina Gverović & Siniša Ilić, Vlatka Horvat, Marko Lulic, Damir Očko , Mladen Stropnik, Marko Tadic , Dino Zrnec & Nick Oberthaler

I’m showing a diminishing stack of text works titled What Remains and a stop-motion animation loop, Moves Walk.

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Here are the details and links for both shows:

20 September – 11 November 2017
Everything we see could also be otherwise (My sweet little lamb…)
The Showroom, London, UK
Curated by WHW, Kathrin Rhomberg and Emily Pethick, in collaboration with the Kontakt Art Collection

Opening reception: 19 September, 6.30-8.30pm

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15 September – 7 October 2017
Temporary Encounters
Galerija Galzenica, Velika Gorica, Croatia
Curated by Branka Benčić

During the month of September, my video This Here and That There (Berlin) is included in Deceleration, a Carte Blanche program for ikonoTV, curated by Claudia Löffelholz.

With videos by Jani Ruscica & Sini Pelkki, Maria Jose Arjona, Niklas Goldbach, Francesca Grilli, Luigi Presicce, William Lamson, Virginia Zanetti, Filippo Berta, Vlatka Horvat, Francesco Cardarelli.

The program is on at 9pm (Berlin/NYC/Shanghai time) every Friday on ikonoTV or you can watch it on ikono-on-demand here.