Vlatka Horvat’s work spans a range of media, from installation, sculpture and performance to collage, photography, video and text-based works. She often uses gestures of reorganization of space and spatial relations between objects, bodies and elements of architecture. Drawn to the contradictory and uncertain aspects of the subject – object relation, Horvat’s work stages encounters between a human body and its context, often problematizing the various frameworks – physical, material, conceptual – within which these encounters take place. Fractures or cuts enacted in physical spaces, objects, images, words – as well as in meaning – become in Horvat’s work sites where larger narratives of her artistic practice are formed. In a video loop titled Moves: Walk, which animates – using stop-motion animation – a fragment of the body taken from the artist’s previous collage work, Horvat “dismembers” the body to create a bizarre, absurd “half-thing” while the very gesture of taking the body apart points to the loss of perspective, the loss of center, balance and instability and to the fragmented character of our identities.
What Remains is a takeaway piece that consists of a stack of paper, each stamped with a red stamp made by the artist, which says “WHAT REMAINS”. The viewers are invited to take a sheet of paper from the top of the pile. As individual pieces of paper are removed, the stack gradually gets smaller and smaller, becoming that which remains in the space. The work speaks of the process of slow disappearance and vanishing, employing a certain literalness of language. The phrase WHAT REMAINS can thus be read both as a statement of ‘what is happening’ to the shrinking stack over time, as well as a fragmented question, posed in a broader sense too – as a question about human presence, about the traces we leave behind in space and in time. In addition, What Remains proposes a kind of an hommage to the physical space of the exhibition space it occupies – a former pharmacy made visible through its new life as Apoteka – Space for Contemporary Art.
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Vlatka Horvat
selected solo exhibitions: Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland), Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York), Zak|Branicka Gallery (Berlin), Bergen Kunsthall, the Kitchen (New York),
selected group exhibitions: 53. October Salon (Beograd), artissima 18 (Torino), “Greater New York” – MoMA PS1 (New York), Gallery Skuc (Ljubljana) i 11th Istanbul biennale.
Holds MA in Performance Studies, Northwestern University, Chicago;
Phd in Visual Cultures and Performance (Roehampton University, 2009).
represented by: Zak| Branicka (Berlin), Rachel Uffner (New York) i annex14 (Zurich).