2022
Artistic Ecologies: Every Day
Vlatka Horvat and Marina Naprushkina
at Galerija Nova, Zagreb, curated by Ana Dević
9 September – 18 October 2022
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From the press release:
Artistic Ecologies Every Day initiates a dialogue between two artists – Vlatka Horvat and Marina Naprushkina – whose distinctive practices bridge practical and speculative, personal and political, artistic and activist sensibilities. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary and collaborative formats, both artists work to reconfigure social and physical limitations in their immediate surroundings. The exhibition brings together their recent and newly produced works across painting, installation, photography and video, including also a workshop framed as part of the project. Artistic Ecologies Every Day refers to “an ecology of practice” that Isabelle Stengers defines as “a tool for thinking through what is happening” – a tool that is “never neutral”. The exhibition approaches artistic ecologies as a process involving actions one does every day. These actions – in the form of small gestures, personal rituals and self-imposed tasks, become provisional tools and strategies relevant for wider communities.
Vlatka Horvat works across sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, photography, video and writing. Her work in a variety of contexts often explores generative possibilities of limitations. Self-imposed restrictions, as well as those already operating in particular contexts, sites and circumstances, become guiding principles for her projects which aim to transform the everyday and the habitual. Amplifying what’s already there – as a way of drawing attention to what is currently happening as well as hinting at the possibility of it being otherwise, Horvat’s works invite the viewer to look more closely at the relation between different agents; human and non-human, animate and inanimate. Horvat is exhibiting a newly produced project titled Ways Across (2022), an ongoing series of photographs documenting makeshift bridges made of found sticks and planks, which she has been chancing upon on her daily walks in a small woods. In the downstairs space, Horvat is showing her recent video Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done (2021), which explores the interaction of human beings, objects and the natural world. The work zooms in on the process of journeying, revealed here as an impossible endeavor whose destination is always both unknown and apparently out of reach. The exhibition will also include Horvat’s new sculptural/collage works and her 2022 artist book To See Stars over Mountains, which gathers 365 works on paper she has made one per day over the course of a year.
Based on an ecological approach to the materiality of artistic production, both artists make use of cheap and readily available materials, bodily gestures, vernacular forms and collaborative and care-full practices. Aimed at revealing and reconfiguring the limitations and violence of existing social structures and systems, the exhibition re-imagines relations within those systems, resisting their extractivist logic. The dialogue between the artists explores and reinvents the field of art both as a place of refuge and as a space for new alliances.
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My works in the show:
Upstairs space
Ways Across, 2022
Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
To See Stars over Mountains, 2022
Artist’s book
Into and Out of, 2022
Assorted objects
One Thing on Top of Another, 2022
Collage on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
a to b, etc., 2022
Marker on paper
Basement
Wall Chair, 2009 – 2022
Modified wood-and-steel chair
Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done, 2021
Video, 24 min
In the window
To Still the Eye, 2018
Acrylic on Arches watercolour paper
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Press:
Novosti (link) – October 2022: “Labours and resistance.” Review of Artistic Ecologies Every Day by Jelena Pašić (in Croatian).
vizkultura (link) – June 2022: In conversation with Jelena Pašić (in Croatian).
