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 ŕ 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.

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.

“Introducing: Vlatka Horvat” was originally published in the May 2007 issue of Modern Painters magazine.