Vlatka Horvat

Cakovec, Croatia, 1974 -

Biographyvlatka@core.com

My work seeks to investigate the relationship of lived experience to language, modes of representation, and social/cultural economies of interaction. I am 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, the 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, my practice combines a systematic, almost rule-based approach with the unstable performative processes of improvisation, repetition, re-doing. Exploiting the tension between my 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 at the same 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 limits/edges of the visual image and limits/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, my 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.

http://www.vlatkahorvat.com/

Person TypeIndividual

Terms