Vlatka Horvat

Born 1974 in ÄŒakovec, Croatia. Lives in New York and London.

Vlatka Horvat's work seeks to investigate the relationship of lived experience to language, modes of representation, and social/cultural economies of interaction. She is particularly interested in the discomforting or uncertain aspects of lived experience – doubt, stuckness and hesitation, strained or uneasy presence. Through an investigation of various conflicting impulses and obsessive attempts, her work playfully approaches strategies and conditions often deemed negative – frustrations, denials and contradictions, the breakdown of systems, the limits of an activity, transitory states and fleeting conditions, the inadequacies of language and representation.

Typically, Horvat's practice combines a systematic, almost rule-based approach with the unstable performative processes of improvisation, repetition, re-doing. Exploiting the tension between her own provisional frameworks and restrictions on the one side, and live play on the other, the projects frequently adopt the form of a catalogue, compiling the multiple attempts in a simple image or an action.

Spanning a range of media – from photography and video, to works on paper and projects with text – the work often focuses on an encounter between a person and a particular system, state, or physical space. Evident across the different media is a preoccupation with frames – frames as the edges or limits of the visual image and as the boundaries of possibilities in language or other systems; as well as limits and borders of physical spaces and bodies, of objects, boxes, and containers. Drawn to a paradox, Horvat's work often seeks to present disappearances, absences, concealments – the vanishing of traces, the ‘not being there’ while ‘being there’ – resulting in images and documents that are at once comical and unsettling, imbued with fragments, holes, and gaps.

Horvat's recent exhibitions including Vlatka Horvat: Beside Itself, Zak Branicka, Berlin, Germany (2011); Out of Left Field, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU) Rijeka, Croatia (2011); Family Matters: The Family in British Art, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich, UK (2011); Vlatka Horvat: As Opposed to the Front, Back, Top and Bottom, Bergen Kunsthall NO5, Bergen, Norway (2011); Invocations of the Blank Page, Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2011); Powders, A Phial and A Paper Book, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY (2011); This Here and That There, Fusebox Festival, Austion, Texas (2011); Take Space For Example, Annex14 Gallery, Bern, Switzerland (2010); Metamorphoses: Error, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (2010); Remodeling Systems, Hessel Museum @Bard CCS, New York (2010). What Keeps Mankind Alive, 11th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2009); Vlatka Horvat: Or Some Other Time, The Kitchen, New York, NY (2009).

For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art