Vlatka Horvat

“In my recent work, which spans a range of media – from sculpture, installation, collage, and drawing to performance, photography, and projects with text – I have been interested in the question of presence and in the possibilities and problematics of occupying space. Often involving gestures of rearranging and reconfiguring both the space itself and the spatial and social relations at play in it, the work tends to probe the precarious and often contentious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment, and landscape.

My investigation into the constraints and possibilities of physical and representational frames is enacted at different scales and in different forms: from images and 2-and-3-dimensional wall-based objects to larger scale projects in the form of room-based installations. At the center of these installations are diverse-but-related sculptural arrangements made of found and commonplace materials – the detritus of urban and industrial life, as well as leftovers and remnants of my own previous projects. These installations tend to enact discrete interventions upon elements of the built environment by attempting to mirror, echo, or repeat particular features of the space they occupy, using decidedly inadequate, cheap materials such as cardboard, paper, sponge, scrap wood, string, and tape.

Using simple gestures such as cutting and folding, dismantling and repairing, stacking, leaning, and layering, the work frequently focuses on re-drawing borders and frames, bringing to the fore the dynamic relation between the center of a space, object, or an image on the one side, and its edges or peripheral areas on the other. Turning the viewer’s attention to the possibilities of peripheral action and to the edges of referential codes, my projects often propose not only a reconfiguration of particular images and objects within a field of activity, but a reconfiguration of the very frames and contexts within which these images and objects might be read.

Many of my projects are organized around a set of self-imposed restrictions, a rule-based framework of sorts within which an activity takes place. The work is often articulated as a series of attempts to circumvent or deal with restrictions at hand, to find solutions inside this provisional framework. The seemingly endless and unresolved nature of the multiple options proposed for each problem reveals these propositions as a series of examples, a taxonomy of possibilities, a catalogue of the multiple ways to do the same thing. Often manifested as ‘versions’, the body, objects, and materials in my work tend to be treated as vulnerable propositions, caught in the dynamic processes of their own multiplication and fragmentation.”