Suchergebnisse

A 3-day durational performance by Vlatka Horvat for KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Hannover Performed by: Karen Christopher, Noémie Solomon, Season Butler, Vlatka Horvat In This Here and That There – Herrenhausen Quartet, four performers arrange and re-arrange a set of 200 chairs in the ponds of the Großer Garten. Working in 8-hour-long stretches over the course of three days, they construct a vast range of temporary structures and arrangements. These oscillate between recognizable chair formations evoking different social situations, and the more abstract, formal or pattern-like constructions. Each chair arrangement speaks of the ways in which the built environment makes possible – or impossible – certain kinds of encounters, and in which the organisation of space invites certain scenarios, narratives and metaphors to be projected onto it. Situating this activity in the water makes the chair arrangements readable as structures or patterns, allowing us to see them both as facts materialised in the water and as gestures that evoke a set of associations. The surreal setting of the water – at once serene and inhospitable – adds a sense of impossibility to the kinds of encounters being evoked, whist the continuous state of flux that the chairs are subjected to renders them un-occupiable, failing to provide a place for rest and stillness which they – as functional objects – seem to promise. The project's movement through a series of short-lived chair arrangements, and the performers' laborious construction of proposals-in-action, bring to the fore a dynamic tension between change and stasis, order and chaos. Through its continuous unfolding in time, the work points to the instability of spatial and social constructs, invoking the restlessness, flux and search for solutions that characterise the contemporary social, cultural and political spheres. Performed in the setting of the Herrenhausen garden, where a sense of order and organisation of space are so strongly articulated, the piece raises questions about the mutually affecting relation between structure and order on the one side, and human presence, action and thought on the other. This Here and That There represents a continuation of Horvat's ongoing exploration of the human figure's contentious relationship with everyday objects, landscape and the built environment. Using simple gestures such as building and un-building, dismantling and repairing, mirroring and re-arranging, Horvat's work across different media – in sculpture, performance, collage, photography – frequently focuses on re-drawing borders and frames, and on re-organising or reconfiguring objects, the body and space itself. Her alternative propositions for spaces, bodies and objects invite us to re-imagine both the environment we occupy and social relations at play in it, and to interrogate what we deem possible within the structures that contain and frame our action.

15th Extraordinary Congress is a 3-year-long project by Vlatka Horvat, commissioned through House on Fire – an international consortium of performance-presenting institutions across Europe, funded by the Cultural Programme of the European Union. Initially co-commissioned by LIFT and 14‐18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions and subsequently presented in 12 European cities (London, Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, Malmo, Lisbon, Poznan, Toulouse, Paris, Bergen, Vienna and Amsterdam). The project is realised as a series of durational performance encounters. Horvat recruited 6 participants/performers for each of the 12 versions of the work – all women of her generation born during socialism in different parts of Yugoslavia. In a 6-hour-long rule-based performance, they sift through their shared memories as they work to unpack and tell a story of the country in which they all grew up, but which no longer exists. In the piece, the seven women sit at a table, exchanging stories and anecdotes, facts and rumours, reflections and thoughts about a country in which all of them grew up, but which no longer exists. Taking turns at telling and re-telling narratives about Yugoslavia, the participants – through an improvised exchange over several hours – attempt to sift through their shared memories of the place, and try to "explain" the reasons surrounding the country's dissolution. Recounting events large and small, excavating bits of history from realms both political and personal, the piece unfolds a complex narrative in which contradictions and inconsistencies sit side by side – decidedly unresolved and open – in a state of tension, dialogue and play. The performance explores the ways in which we make stories out of large, complex political and historical events and the inherent and irreconcilable tensions which exist between versions of stories as they are told and understood in different contexts, and reflected upon from both a physical and temporal distance. The project – at the heart of which is an engagement with other people via encounters with their personal and collective narratives and histories – involved collaboration with practitioners not only from the fields of art and performance but also with journalists, filmmakers, sociologists, human rights activists, conceptual architects, writers. There have been 12 different versions of the project, each realized with a new group of women living in the city where the piece is being presented: London – LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) at Battersea Arts Centre. June 2014. With: Jasmina Cibic, Larisa Blazić, Nela Milić, Suzana Tamamović, Vanda Butković, Vesna Marić and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Claire Marshall. Brussels – KAAI Studios. January 2015. With: Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ana Stegnar, Bojana Cvejić, Ivana Jozić, Maja Bekan, Vjosa Musliu and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Tine Van Aerschot. Berlin – HAU (Hebbel am Ufer). June 2015. With: Hana Stojić, Paula Muhr, Tanja Ostojić, Vanja Bućan, Vedrana Madžar, Vernesa Berbo and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Nina Kronjåger. Poznan – Malta Festival. June 2015. With: Ana Svetozarov, Azra Junuzović, Gordana Đurđev-Małkiewicz, Roska Vrgova, Stanislava Kostić and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Wanda Wasilewska. Translator: Anna Jelec. Lisbon – Teatro Maria Matos at Espaço Alkantara. October 2015. With: Anamarija Marinović, Jelena Bakić, Jelena Savić, Lidija Kolovrat, Marija Pavlović, Mateja Rožman and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Cristina Perez. Bergen – METEOR Festival at BIT Theatergarasjen. October 2015. With: Ana Pavlović, Azra Halilović, Jelena Spasenić, Lejla Sokolović Indjić and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Hilde Sandvik. Malmo – INKONST. September 2016. With: Nina Bozić Yams, Merima Dizdarević, Sanda Rebac Jugo, Sanela Selimović, Slavica Agatonović and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Agneta Nordin. Oslo – Black Box Teater. February 2017. With: Ana Golub, Azra Halilović, Dragana Kovačevićević Bielicki, Iris Hadžiosmanović, Naida Sudić, Nataša Zednik and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk. Toulouse – Theatre Garonne. March 2017. With: Ana Veda, Jovana Milić, Marijana Marendić, Mirjana Lončar, Selma Polovina and Vanda Marijanović. Moderator: Lucie Combs. Vienna – Tanzquartier Wien. March 2017. With: Anamarija Batista, Jana Dolečki, Jelena Kaludjerović, Maja Damnjanović, Nataša Mačkuljak and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Nuit Banai. Amsterdam – Frascati. March 2017. With: Aleksandra Popovska, Armina Pilav, Bojana Mladenović, Maja Lovrenović, Nevena Bajalica and Vlatka Horvat. Moderator: Marijke Hoogenboom. Paris – Fondation Cartier, in partnership with Theatre de la Ville. May 2017. With: Barbara Matijevic, Bojana Bauer, Jelena Rajak, Kristina Aleksandrovska, Mila Turajlic, Milena Jaksic. Moderator: Zoé Varié.

Minor Planets is a performance by Vlatka Horvat for five performers who work to make sense of themselves and their relation to each other as they traverse an impoverished landscape of detritus, wooden planks and fabric scraps. Using decidedly inadequate resources, and locked in a decaying set of rules and mischievous games, the five negotiate a place for themselves, making and re-making the world they inhabit. Beginning initially with research into the Russian Revolution, the project draws on my experience of living through the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its legacy of confusion and opportunism. Looking at how people deal with structural collapse, the piece speaks to the broader landscape of uncertainty that marks current events. Minor Planets is co-comissioned by HAU – Hebbel am Ufer and HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt; and presented by HAU Berlin in the programme of their 'Utopian Realities' platform, part of the larger "100 Years of Now" research project, funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and overseen by HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Each chair arrangement speaks of the ways in which the built environment makes possible – or impossible – certain kinds of encounters, and in which the organisation of space invites certain scenarios, narratives and metaphors to be projected onto it. Situating this activity in the water makes the chair arrangements readable as structures or patterns, allowing us to see them both as facts materialised in the water and as gestures that evoke a set of associations. The surreal setting of the water – at once serene and inhospitable – adds a sense of impossibility to the kinds of encounters being evoked, whist the continuous state of flux that the chairs are subjected to renders them un-occupiable, failing to provide a place for rest and stillness which they – as functional objects – seem to promise. The project's movement through a series of short-lived chair arrangements, and the performers' laborious construction of proposals-in-action, bring to the fore a dynamic tension between change and stasis, order and chaos. Through its continuous unfolding in time, the work points to the instability of spatial and social constructs, invoking the restlessness, flux and search for solutions that characterise the contemporary social, cultural and political spheres. Performed in the setting of the Herrenhausen garden, where a sense of order and organisation of space are so strongly articulated, the piece raises questions about the mutually affecting relation between structure and order on the one side, and human presence, action and thought on the other. This Here and That There represents a continuation of Horvat's ongoing exploration of the human figure's contentious relationship with everyday objects, landscape and the built environment. Using simple gestures such as building and un-building, dismantling and repairing, mirroring and re-arranging, Horvat's work across different media – in sculpture, performance, collage, photography – frequently focuses on re-drawing borders and frames, and on re-organising or reconfiguring objects, the body and space itself. Her alternative propositions for spaces, bodies and objects invite us to re-imagine both the environment we occupy and social relations at play in it, and to interrogate what we deem possible within the structures that contain and frame our action.

Vlatka Horvat's collage series With the Sky on Their Shoulders and The Past Is Another Country both use as their source material historical family photographs from the late 60s / early 70s. Featuring the artist's parents as young adults in socialist Yugoslavia, these works look back at images of a generation which, in the context of post-socialism, the artist sees as the lost generation. Born in the aftermath of WW2 and approaching their 50s at the time of Yugoslavia's demise, this was the generation whose entire lives were reframed in the early 90s as a "mistake;" something they should distance themselves from, something they should disavow, forget, or – remember differently. By modifying photographs from a particular historical moment associated with idealism and optimism, Horvat re-imagines that time "before everything", with all the knowledge of the consequences, injustices and cruelty that a large systemic change brought upon the lives of people caught up in its midst. Violent and humourous in equal measure, the two series explore the figure/ground dynamics, as it pertains both to the formal aspects of images, as well as to the broader spatial, socio-political and historical frameworks. -- Most of the images comprising With the Sky on Their Shoulders feature the artist's father and his (mostly male) colleagues and friends as they pose for the camera in different arrangements. Horvat subjects the protagonists of her source images to all kinds of indignities: cuts out and folds down their heads, gouges out their eyes, flips around parts of their bodies, "mistakes" them for their surroundings, cutting through them along the lines of the ground or the horizon. Sometimes she approaches these groups of figures as constellations of individual bodies which her interventions seek to anonymise, sever or discombobulate; other times she treats the group as a single object – a "blob" in the landscape or a stain on the ground. By contrast, the images comprising The Past Is Another Country all depict a lone female figure, the artist's mother, in scenes from which both the physical context and all other figures have been evacuated. Using again a series of cutting and folding gestures, Horvat sometimes removes the surroundings around the figure of her mother, leaving her suspended in the midst of empty frames. Other times, she folds the figure onto itself, or over the edge of the photograph, relocating her to the space in the margins, entirely outside the photograph's image area. These gestures of excavation and the holes, openings and interruptions they create in the source images draw our attention to the distorting lens of memory, to the gaps and absences we are confronted with when we look at historical material. At the same time, they point to the deliberate acts of erasure, removal and revision that have become instrumental tools deployed by politicians, governments, and others with a vested interest in manipulating how we understand our collective histories.

Solo exhibition at Zak|Branicka, Berlin Investigating the politics and poetics of spatial arrangement, order and organization, interpersonal and social relations, Vlatka Horvat's practice explores the characteristics of interaction between the body, the built environment and the objects that inhabit it. In her collages, photographs and installations, Horvat often places the body in awkward, puzzling and uncanny positions, situating it on the horizon of objecthood – a move which questions the stability of categories and structures through which social and political meaning is made. Whilst the body in Horvat's work is repeatedly depicted as disjointed and discombobulated, situated between functional and dysfunctional, between subject and object, the space in which it performs its often absurdist and Dadaist operations, is itself 'out of joint'. Horvat approaches built space and time as series of elements, which can be re-arranged and reconstituted, as though the true nature of both might only become intelligible through the process of unraveling them. In these procedures, – which include cutting and severing objects, merging them with other dismantled objects, or intervening in built spaces by emulating elements of architecture using cheap disposable materials such as sponge, cardboard and rubber bands –, the space, the objects and bodies it contains, all converge into a puzzling and uncanny field of new special and temporal becomings. At the centre of the gallery's main space, Horvat presents a selection of new wall-based collage works The Past is Another Country in which the artist reaches for what lies beneath the surface of her family photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, made in Socialist Yugoslavia, at the time when the idea of solidarity, belief in the future and progress were still at their pinnacle. Horvat's mode of 'entering' these images–all featuring her mother as young adult–through a set of sophisticated, formal gestures, suggests an almost infantile attempt of evicting the intergenerational transfer of the sense of loss and disillusionment. Using a series of cutting and folding gestures, the artist sometimes removes all context and surroundings around the figure, leaving it suspended in the midst of empty frames. At other times Horvat folds the figure outside the edges of the photograph, or outside the edges of the paper itself. The relation between the sides and the middle similarly comes to the fore in the sculptural work Peripheral Awareness, in which a range of round or tubular objects are placed at the very edges of a table, precariously stopped at the table's brink, apparently caught at a precipice. The safety of the middle and the stability of the centre are abandoned here for a more precarious space of the edge, and the possibility of the objects "going over the edge" (in both literal and metaphorical sense) hangs in the air. As is the case with Horvat's collages, in Peripheral Awareness, the safe center also becomes a site of abandonment–evacuated and deserted –while the edges become sites of activity, enlivened with the presence of objects/figures occupying it, but which are displaced and stopped in a precarious balance between stability and the potential fall. The walls around the sculptural works hold Spread Pages, Horvat's delicate reworkings of the surface of A4 paper. Here the artist again applies a formally consistent process of cutting and folding their surfaces, expanding them outwards from their one-time boundaries to create a constellation of Moebius-like geometrical conundrums. In this process, basic blank pages are dismantled as solid flat-plane surfaces to become problematic three-dimensional artifacts whose borders, edges, and interior dimensions are constantly an issue. While much of Horvat's work to date has subjected a human figure to gestures such as cutting and severing, recombining and reconfiguring, here the focus shifts to the reconfiguration of an object, to negotiation and distribution of space itself, to the possibilities of occupying it, and of re-drawings its borders. In the spatial redefinition and literal unpacking of this everyday object–the page–and in the repeated flux/reversal of outside and inside, Spread Pages evokes the social and political movements of territorial expansion and conquest, and the psychological processes of interior revelation and exploration.

My work across different media – performance, video, photography, collage, sculpture, and installation – often deals with the precarious relationship between a human body and a set of objects, space, landscape or built environment. In this paper I will zoom in on a very small and specific area of the work, focusing on the dissolution and discombobulation of the figure as it is enacted and performed in my image based collage works, discussing how collage perform this disassembly, and re-assembly, of body-as-object / body-as-image differently than the photographic works. A scholarly essay in which Horvat uses their collage works to think through the politics and poetics of collage, placing their figurative works in collage in historical and theoretical frameworks, with a particular focus on collage's ability to dismantle and re-imagine the body. A bilingual journal; article published in both English and Croatian

"Exit Taxonomy" is a text based around a maverick taxonomy of types of exists, investigating departures and acts of leaving, as they pertain to both personal and political realms. Mapping out a decidedly incomplete system of classification of departures both voluntary and enforced, the text draws from a range of references and events from the news and current events, from memory and personal experience, from fiction and cinema, from the popular culture, in order to engage questions of access, freedom, belonging, choice, as well questions of personal and social responsibility.