NEW YORK (Modern Painters)—Vlatka Horvat’s repeated efforts at camouflage have found her buried in a suitcase, standing behind a door, cloaked in her own skirt, and—notable for its attempt if not its result—trying to conceal herself behind a sleek red fire extinguisher in her studio. In each of these iconic photographs from the 2003 series “Hiding,” the young Croatian-born, New York–based artist remains partially in sight while clearly trying to hide. Each action epitomizes an instance of Horvat’s ample cartography of failure: an infinitely expanding visual archive of frustrated objectives and desires. Her attempts to physically and conceptually occupy and engage representational spaces—domestic, industrial, political—are consistently defeated; she neither conceals herself nor experiences the existential “oneness” with the world that she is after. Further foiling her artistic efforts is her chosen medium. As a representational system that privileges visibility, photography makes it impossible for a subject to remain unseen; an image’s very nature is to reveal the body’s location within space. This detail does not, however, prevent our heroine from endlessly trying to trump photography’s logic. Again and again, Horvat assumes an awkward physical position while trying to disguise her body behind the commonplace objects that invariably let her down: traffic signs, garbage cans, lampposts, suitcases, cardboard boxes. Her exhaustive process of finding new locations in which to avoid being seen, while documenting herself in the act, is very much a game, yet her farcical staging of the visibility-invisibility dialectic has serious implications: it articulates the artist’s misgivings about the ability of any system to capture and faithfully translate lived experience. Horvat’s works, then, suggest the fragile, often disempowered position of the individual in a contemporary historical context marked by basic sociopolitical insecurity.

If we consider Horvat’s biography, we might suspect that this search for imaginative solutions within an often-illogical existence, creative improvisation within the limitations of an overarching system, is partially connected to growing up in socialist Yugoslavia during Tito’s regime in the 1970s. Horvat pays tribute to her ideologically tinged childhood in Oaths and Partisan Songs from Memory (2003), a video in which she sings the songs that marked her formative years. With false starts and English interjections, the braided Horvat is seen wrestling with her own memories, trying to find the exact lyrics and melodies that elude her. Caught between two idioms—Croatian and English—neither of which performs perfectly, she negotiates the push and pull between different modes of belonging. A piece made the following year, Under the Table, similarly demonstrates the futility of conformity (and confinement), though with more menacing overtones. A grid of C-prints documents 16 ways in which a body (the artist’s own) can fit under a table. The influence of Minimalist seriality on the work is explicit, but so is the allusion to sheltering one’s body in the event of an emergency like a bombing raid. The recent Balkan war makes such a threat far from theoretical, and imbues Horvat’s overall oeuvre with references that go beyond the formal.

And yet, despite these recurring political connotations, Horvat’s work is situated in a far-reaching dialogue with art-historical precedents, which she both absorbs and updates. Her work resonates with the Minimalist oeuvre of Robert Morris, the performative work of Vito Acconci, and the photographic self-portraits of VALIE EXPORT in its articulation of the strained relationship between systems of representation, space, and the human body; she gently mocks the idea of ever reaching some ideal condition of totality or closure. The anxiety associated with this fragmented predicament comes up in works like Out on a Limb (2003), a video in which Horvat balances on a tree stump on only one leg; Here to Stay (2006), a site-specific intervention made of leaves that spell out the work’s title before being dispersed by the elements; and Obstructed (2007), a series of three photographs in which the artist’s body is hidden (and revealed) in different ways behind the white column of a gallery. But it is perhaps best realized in Restless (2003), a video in which Horvat compulsively maneuvers between different seats in an empty auditorium. Never leaving the frame, she gets up, sits down, and climbs over chairs, as if in search of the perfect vantage point from which to witness an unseen performance. The body, she suggests, exists in a troubled relationship with both its own limits and its external surroundings, one that seems to trap the individual in an infinitely repeating loop or a Sartrean à huis clos. In this kind of unstable reality, Horvat hints, the viewer must accept that he or she will frequently experience doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty. The payoff, if we deem it that, is the potential for a mode of existence that, while precarious, remains open to the possibility of change. Relating to the sociopolitical dimensions of her work, Restless emphasizes the centrality of the body to the formulation of experience. While states, governments, and art institutions may try to discipline the body—of the immigrant, the refugee, or the art public—Horvat suggests that there is always a physical aspect that will resist such attempts.