Photo courtesy the artist

Vlatka Horvat, "Searching #9" (2003-4)

Photo courtesy the artist

Vlatka Horvat, "Searching #11" (2003-4)

More on Vlatka Horvat

Vlatka Horvat's work will be included in the exhibition "Ground Lost" at Galerie Nova in Zagreb in June.

Her project This Here and That There will be presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in August.
For more information, please visit www.hkw.de

Her Web site is vlatkahorvat.com.

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This negotiation of the tension between the body, space, and institutional systems also informs her recent project, “Repurposed” (2007), a series of collages made for the “Ground Lost” exhibition at the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, Austria. In this work, Horvat employs the blueprint of the gallery to give it alternative uses (such as a public bathroom, a boxing ring, or an amusement park). These proposals take on preposterous dimensions as Horvat includes the historical models for each site on the same blueprint while also filling it with fictional elements and inconsistencies. Although no institutional space could possibly accommodate a transformation on this scale, she is pointing to contemporary situations where such attempts have been made. For example, even as she operates within the discourse of institutional critique, Horvat is simultaneously reflecting the plight of war-torn countries like her native Croatia, where many public places were transformed into temporary lodgings for refugees during the war in the 1990s. Through this additive gesture of collage, she makes visible the potential of spaces whose identity has traditionally been considered fixed, reimagining them to such an extent that their physical boundaries begin to crumble. More specifically, and echoing the ideas of Michel Foucault, she is suggesting that the dispositifs, or grids of intelligibility, through which we think about space, are both historically conditioned and open to questioning.

This critique of the role of space in shaping identity informs Horvat’s occasional collaboration with artist Tim Etchells. In a project titled To Bring Down a House (2006) at the Kunsthaus Graz, Horvat and Etchells installed a fax machine in one room of a modular house, which they named “Nothing Good House.” Several times a day for a month, he from Sheffield and she from New York, they faxed in drawings, collages, diagrams, texts, and proposals on how to destroy the concept of “house.” The accumulation of these cryptic faxes formed the basis of the installation. The proposed interventions ranged from violent acts to mildly annoying—even puzzling—scenarios, some feasible, others implausible: schemes included “overcrowd it,” “unleash termites,” “drop bombs,” “remove the roof,” and “fill it with bad memories.” By the end of the month, the walls were covered with imagined situations and antagonistic directions. Echoing Gordon Matta-Clark’s physical interventions into built space, Horvat and Etchells achieved their ruinous objectives through words and drawings alone. In this double assault, the frame of the exhibition itself was subtly undermined, drawing the viewer away from the notion of the house as a symbol of coziness and domesticity and into a more complex and contradictory experience of inhabitable space as shelter, trap, and target.

The cumulative effect of Horvat’s work is to wryly and provocatively destabilize the monolithic reach of systems of representation. Most notably, her works reveal the tenuous relationship between social space and the construction of the individual. Emblematic of this project is the series “Searching” (2003–2004), which consists of 11 C-prints showing Horvat in different locations, peering into a variety of objects, her head always obscured (e.g., in a plastic bucket, an overgrown hedge, or a washing machine). These absurd scenarios, which employ photography in a reflexive process, may seem to doom Horvat to the perpetual enactment of physical and conceptual self-containment, forever caught within the limits of a physical site, an ideology, or an artistic medium. Yet there is something about the works’ deadpan humor that interferes with this closure. By reaching for improbable frontiers, Horvat creates a temporary disruption in the realm of representation, a gray zone of difference where nothing—neither identity, nor landscape, nor their ambiguous relationship—is settled.