2024
Vlatka Horvat: By the Means at Hand
Pavilion of Croatia at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
20 April – 24 November 2024
By the Means at Hand is Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Engaging with the theme of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition for La Biennale di Venezia, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion, curated by Antonia Majaca, exists as an accumulative exhibition of artworks by a wide-ranging group of international artists living “as foreigners,” reflecting on questions and urgencies of the diasporic experience. Horvat is inviting artists living in diaspora all over the world to engage in a series of reciprocal exchanges of artworks and other materials, all of which are sent between Venice and other places by improvised means – via various friends, travelers, and strangers who are enlisted as informal couriers for the project.
The title of the project – By the Means at Hand – refers to the improvised transport systems whereby individuals activate informal networks of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to deliver letters, parcels, documents, money, and other material goods to family members and others who live in cities or countries far away. While such practices are born out of social dispersal, migration, and displacement, the networks they give rise to build effectively on wider principles of solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, and friendship – factors that the project emphasizes as prerequisites for co-existing with others, and as key elements in the toolkit for those living “in foreign lands.”
By the Means at Hand also points to a wide range of broader themes such as alternative logistics, the spontaneous production of social relations, informal and gift economies, and the idea of trustfulness. On a subtler, yet crucial, infrastructural level, the project takes off from a recognition of the state of emergency when it comes to the climate crisis, and the substantial environmental footprint of institutionalized modes of production, transportation, and presentation of contemporary art. The project’s improvisatory system of delivering artworks to and from Venice forgoes the formal transport system, using instead journeys that are happening anyway.
Situated within the intimate space of Fàbrica 33 in the Cannaregio – Fondamente Nove neighborhood of Venice, the Croatian Pavilion stages a dynamic interplay of three-dimensional structures, images, and drawings. The venue also serves as Vlatka’s temporary studio for the duration of the biennale.
The Croatian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia is commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, and organized by Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art (Vodnjan, Croatia).
Realized with the generous support of Luma Foundation. Supported by a research residency at Centrala, and by a donation of equipment and materials by Epson.
Project website and full credits here
Order Vlatka Horvat: By the Means at Hand catalogue from Archive Books
Download (free) By the Means at Hand: A Reader (PDF)
Download Works Inventory for the list of all contributing artists and their works
See Venice (by Hand) – the 196 collages Vlatka made while in residency at the pavilion
Selected Press Clipping
A short video introducing the project:
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A few days before the closing of the Biennale, we organized an ‘in conversation’ event featuring Antonia and me. Drawing from our extensive dialogue that has taken place over the course of working on By the Means at Hand, we discussed the project’s reimagining of artistic exchange, community, and belonging in our current moment of ecological crisis and rising nationalism.
All photography and video: Hugo Glendinning
