Expanded Performance: Vlatka Horvat

Main page Expanded Performance: click here

Vlatka Horvat, Replacements: follow the progress on: http://stroom.typepad.com/replacements/

Tuesday 11 December 2012, 5 pm
Lecture Vlatka Horvat: 'Reorganization of space and spatial relations'
Location: Auditorium Royal Academy of Art, Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague.
RSVP not necessary.

Friday 14 December 2012, 4 pm
Presentation results workshop Vlatka Horvat
Location: KABK (Royal Academy of Art The Hague), space PB 225, Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague
RSVP not necessary
For one full week Vlatka Horvat will give an intensive workshop for third year students (3d and Autonomous) of the KABK around the theme of Expanded Performance. This afternoon the end results will be presented. Everybody is welcome.

For Expanded Performance Horvat is producing two new projects. The first one, titled Replacements, unfolds over time and involves participation of Stroom staff - everyone from the curators and the director to the librarian, the maintenance staff and the installers. Each day for the duration of the exhibition a different member of staff selects an object from anywhere in the building and relocates it to the exhibition space for the day, replacing the object that had been placed there the day before. As each object is dislocated from its everyday place and function, it is temporarily re-imagined as an art object, put in new spatial and social relations with other objects in the exhibition space and with people who encounter it there. In addition to displacing objects and removing them from their context, Replacements playfully disrupts the work routine of people working at Stroom, engaging them in a sort of a game of call and response and recasting them as performers / installers / decision makers in a project.

As part of their project task, participants take two photographs: one of the previous day's object, as they found it in the gallery, and one of the new object after they've relocated it to the exhibition space. The images are uploaded to a Replacements blog where visitors can follow the unfolding of the project from day to day for the duration of the exhibition.

Horvat's second project is a two-part spatial intervention in two stairway corridors located at the front and back end of Stroom's exhibition space. Drift (Floor) and Drift (Wall) (both 2012), comprise series of fragile cardboard constructions positioned flush against the wall along one side of each of the two corridors. Made out of cardboard boxes which have been cut into strips and then re-assembled into differently-sized frames using colourful insulation tape, these imperfectly geometrical structures are organized in line ups of sorts - horizontal and floor based in one instance, and upright and protruding into the vertical space of the corridor in another.

These makeshift and provisional frames seem to respond to the rectangular shape of the narrow space they occupy, but neither match the width of the space nor follow its bends and corners accurately. Instead, in both the vertical and horizontal version of the work, the lined-up structures create additional frames and dividers inside the existing geometrical framework of the corridor, forming an obstacle course of sorts, and forcing the visitors to negotiate the reduced width of the corridor by squeezing between the wall and the partial barriers erected in their path.

Directly interacting with the elements of architecture, the project draws attention to the physical thresholds of the built space - passages, doorways, walls and rooms - by repeating frames and structures that already exist in the building and creating distorted or inadequate imprints of them - miniature and uninhabitable versions of architectural spaces.

Additionally, these decidedly ill-fitting wall attachments appear as unruly "growths" protruding from the walls, creating rugged and serrated disruptions on the walls' flat surface. The physical properties of cardboard as a building material - its fragility, flimsiness and impermanence - evoke organic forms and natural growths - vines, branches, roots. Starting in the corridors in both incarnations of the work, the temporary cardboard arrangements curve around the wall in Drift (Floor) or stick out of the confines of the corridor in Drift (Wall), spreading, as it were, into the main space of the gallery.

http://stroom.typepad.com/replacements

‘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. (...) 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.'
- From A note on temporal parts and their discontents, a 2010 catalogue essay by Antonia Majaca, accompanying Horvat's solo exhibition Beside Itself at Zak | Branicka Gallery in Berlin.


LINKS
www.vlatkahorvat.com

racheluffnergallery.com
Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York
www.zak-branicka.com
Zak | Branicka, Berlin
www.annex14.com/
annex14, Bern
www.artnet.de
'Still, Aber Nicht Sprachlos', review by Gesine Borcherdt of Vlatka Horvat: 'Beside Itself' at Zak | Branicka Gallery, Berlin, January 2012
http://vimeo.com/19069967
Video of a talk Vlatka Horvat gave at Bergen Kunsthall in 2011
Bergen Kunsthall catalogue (pdf file)
'Room Pieces', essay by Tim Etchells from the Bergen Kunsthall catalogue 'Vlatka Horvat: In Other Words In Other's Words And Other Words', 2011
www.arteecritica.it
'Reorganising and Reimagining Space', interview with Vlatka Horvat by Lorenzo Bruni, December 2010 (Italian & English)
Art Monthly
'Vlatka Horvat', feature/profile by Graham Parker, May 2009
Artillery magazine
Review by Marc Orange of 'Or Some Other Time' (at the Kitchen, NYC), March 2009
johannareed.blogspot.nl
Interview with Vlatka Horvat by Johanna Reed, 2008
www.artinfo.com
'Vlatka Horvat', by Nuit Banai, Modern Painters, May 2007