Vlatka Horvat is a Croatian-born London-based artist who uses a range of media such as sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, photography, video, and writing. In her work, she explores the relationship between the body and its surroundings, as well as questions related to presence and the ways in which things occupy and share space. She has had exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, PEER (London), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Hessel Museum – Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), and MoMA PS1 (New York City), and her work has been included in the Croatian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2018 (Venice), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya), and the 11th Istanbul Biennale.
Her most recent project, By the Means at Hand, is currently exhibited at the Pavilion of Croatia at the 60th Venice Biennale. The exhibition, curated by Antonia Majaca, presents works by various international artists invited by Horvat to exchange artworks with her, using an informal network of couriers to get the works to and from Venice instead of traditional means of transport. We had a phone call at the end of April to chat about her work and the experience of exhibiting at the Biennale.
Aleksandra Mainka-Pawlowska: What is the meaning behind the title of your work?
Vlatka Horvat: The title of my project, By the Means at Hand, refers to what is at hand — materials and tools that are readily available, and the idea of working with what’s around you. It also refers to the practice of looking for and recognising something that is already happening and using those processes as a starting point to get something done. Concretely, the title, and the project itself, speak to informal practices that are in place all over the world whereby people activate their networks of friends or family members, neighbours, and acquaintances to send things from one place to another. This is the modus operandi we are using for the project — we are sending artworks back and forth across different countries but we’re not using the postal office or transport companies. Instead, we are using a hand-to-hand delivery system that involves giving packages to friends to bring them to Venice in their luggage.
There’s something about going around the official system, circumventing the capitalistic modes, and instead using this improvised human-based transport network which is at the same time a support network. By the Means at Hand taps into the idea of solidarity, mutual help, generosity, and trust, and relies on the belief that people are willing to help each other. Last spring when I was developing the idea for this project, my US driving license expired and I managed to renew it online, but then I needed someone to collect it in New York and bring it to London. So I posted on Facebook asking if anyone could help me with that, and within two hours I had offers from five people. And three of them were people that I didn’t even know! So I thought it’s amazing that people jump in to help each other… Of course, my project for Venice also brings to mind historical practices of improvised transport, which very often came out of poverty and lack of resources. When my grandmother used to send things to my mum at university by taking them to the bus stop and giving them to the bus driver, it was also because she didn’t have money to use the postal system. So these improvised methods are very much a staple method of people who are trying to make something happen without really having the resources. In that sense, the project addresses conditions of poverty and precarity, as well as a certain human ingenuity and ability to come up with ways to accomplish something in spite of those conditions.
AMP: Would you say it’s also more sustainable than traditional transport methods?
VH: Yes, absolutely. Especially when you look at a structure such as the Venice Biennale and other large exhibitions of its kind, they have a huge carbon footprint and also generate an incredible amount of waste afterwards which isn’t looked after. With the informal transport method we are using, the project doesn’t add any more travel, it doesn’t create any additional transport or shipping. It operates by piggybacking and attaching itself to other journeys which are happening anyway.
Using these alternative means is also an attempt to think about new models for organising contemporary art exhibitions and I think this is something we need to normalise. How exhibitions are organised, and how we can realise them in ways that aren’t continuing to destroy the world or the climate. This was something we very much wanted to be part of the conversation around this exhibition. We did have a little rehearsal of sorts for collaborating over distance during COVID when we tried different ways of working with others that didn’t involve travel. So we took some lessons from that. In a way, this project can also be thought of as a set of conversations and collaborations over distance, where artists taking part don’t have to travel, they just have to find somebody who’s already going to Venice for their own reasons and who can bring their work over. Also, the structures we are using at the exhibition to display the artworks were built locally in Venice so we didn’t use any transport for that either. We worked with an organisation in Venice called Rebiennale/R3B: Reuse, Recycle, Rebuild, which grew out of a citizens’ initiative a while back, which recognised the problems associated with the Venice Biennale in terms of the amount of trash it produces every time. They started by collecting the leftovers of exhibitions after de-installation and worked to give the materials a second life. They built social projects around the city, for instance, a gym for kids or a refugee centre. But soon they realised they had to get involved at the front end of the process because for materials to be reusable after an exhibition, you have to think about it at the point of design and construction — how things are assembled and dismantled so that the materials don’t get damaged to the point of non-usability. They helped us figure out how the structures needed to be built so that afterwards the materials could be reused in the best possible way.
AMP: How does By The Means at Hand engage with the theme of the Biennale – “Foreigners Everywhere”?
VH: My starting point for creating the work was to design an invitational framework. I created a structure, with some rules and parameters, and then I invited other artists into the structure. So there is something that is determined and set, inside which there is room for improvisation and play. Concretely, the frame that I created for the project involves my inviting artists who are all foreigners in the countries where they live to engage in a series of exchanges with me – the invited participants are all from different places, living in different places. When I invited them, I asked each person to make a small-scale work which in some way reflects on the idea of being a foreigner or living in a diaspora, or which documents or speaks in some way to their lived experience of migration. So in one sense, the exhibition becomes a series of dialogues between different artists around the idea of foreignness, diaspora, and immigration.
AMP: Was it intentional to invite international artists even though at the Biennale every pavilion represents a specific nation?
VH: Yes — I wanted to quietly challenge this frame of the national pavilions because I think it’s a problematic one. It reiterates the idea of borders and is based on the assumption that somehow a sense of identity or belonging is linked to national identity, which for me has never been the case. So I wanted to pick a bit of a fight with that frame by inviting artists from different countries to take part. This is a project for the Croatian pavilion but the Croatian pavilion becomes a place of meeting rather than a place that reiterates some sense of national identity. By the Means at Hand convenes a kind of a temporary community of artists from different places, and asks questions about the nature of belonging, about these categories that group us in the world – categories of citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, nationality, and asks how acts of grouping and coming together can follow from logics other than national belonging and identity. The logic for connecting people here is friendship, shared experience of a certain kind, and mutual help — for me, these principles are principles I want to live by, rather than the definitions and categories based on identity and political status.
AMP: Can you tell us more about the collages you will be working on while in Venice? Why did you choose collage as your technique?
VH: For the duration of the Biennale, I’m living in Venice as a temporary resident and a foreigner. The collages I’m making relate to the experience of living in a city I don’t know. The idea is that I start with photographs of Venice I take with my phone every day when I go for a walk, which I print out and make interventions on the printouts by hand. Sometimes I draw on the photographs, sometimes I cut them up and rearrange them, or collage different things onto them. So in a way, I’m trying to get to know the city by looking at it repeatedly every day and at the same time trying to imagine little transformations of this urban setting I’m part of for eight months. At the heart of this project is a reciprocal exchange between me and the artists sending their works to me here – I’m sending these collages back to each of these artists using the same method of asking couriers to take them by hand. For each work that arrives here in the pavilion, I send one of mine back to that artist. I was thinking about how the works of others come from different geographic locations and each of them was made a different person. By contrast, what I’m making here are collages which deal with this place and I’m dispatching these artworks to all these other countries and cities. So this is another way in which I try to problematise the idea of a national pavilion by dispersing the work that is produced during my residency here at the pavilion to many geographic locations.
AMP: You recently had a residency at Centrala in Birmingham – is it connected to your Biennale project?
VH: Alicja [Kaczmarek] from Centrala [Birmingham] approached me last year when it was announced that I was preparing a project for Venice and she offered to support the project by inviting me for an artistic residency. During March, I was in residence at Centrala doing some preparatory work, developing the project further, and starting to prepare the collages. Basically, it was a research phase of the project before I moved to Venice. As part of that residency, we organised an exhibition at Centrala, at the centre of which was a film of mine that I made in 2021 called “Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done” – a half-hour short film that explores similar questions around mobility and the relationship between the body and a set of objects. In a sense, it is linked to my ongoing investigation of questions around mobility and movement, and the relationship between the human agents and the inanimate things, elements of the built space, and landscape.
AMP: It sounds like you’re very busy at the moment – is there anything you’re planning to see while in Venice if you find some free time?
VH: So far I haven’t had much time to leave the pavilion at all… I did manage to go on a walk last night and it was primarily because my producer made me do it! It’s been quite an unusual ten days because the opening week was extremely busy, with a lot of couriers arriving with packages. But I think now the project is catching a different rhythm. I’m here for eight months so I’m going to do one thing at a time and I want to see everything, but slowly. Last night, when I went for a walk, I did manage to see the Slovenian pavilion which is outside in public space. There are many brilliant exhibitions, a lot of pavilions I’m looking forward to seeing, and also a lot of other events, exhibitions also of many friends that I want to support. I have the luxury of eight months to take my time and slowly explore.
