CROATIAN PAVILION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE
Engaging with the theme of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition for the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion by the Means at Hand, curated by Antonia Majaca, exists as an accumulative exhibition of artworks by a wide-ranging group of international artists living as “foreigners,” reflecting on questions and urgencies of the diasporic experience.
For the exhibition, Horvat is inviting artists living in diaspora all over the world to engage in a series of reciprocal exchanges of artworks and other materials, all of which are sent between Venice and other places by improvised means, with the help of various friends, acquaintances and even strangers travelling to Venice, who are enlisted as informal couriers for the project.
The title of the project—By the Means at Hand—refers to the improvised transport systems whereby individuals activate informal networks to deliver letters, parcels, documents, money, and other material goods to family members and others who live far away. While such practices are born out of social dispersal, migration, and displacement, the networks they give rise to build effectively on wider principles of solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, and friendship—factors that the project emphasizes as prerequisites for co-existing with others, and as key elements in the toolkit for those living “in foreign lands.”
Situated within the intimate space of Fàbrica 33 in the Cannaregio—Fondamente Nove neighborhood of Venice, the Croatian Pavilion will also serve as Horvat’s temporary studio for the duration of the biennale.
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Pavilion of CROATIA. By the Means at Hand. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of CROATIA. By the Means at Hand. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of CROATIA. By the Means at Hand. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of CROATIA. By the Means at Hand. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of CROATIA. By the Means at Hand. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of CROATIA. By the Means at Hand. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Vlatka Horvat is an artist working across a wide range of forms from sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, and photography to performance, video, writing, and publishing. Reconfiguring space and social relations at play in it, her projects often rework the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment, and landscape. 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), Stroom (The Hague), Bergen Kunsthall, the Kitchen (New York City) and MoMA PS1 (New York City), and her work has been included in the Croatian Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennale (Venice), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya), and the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Her performances have been commissioned by venues including HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), LIFT—London International Festival of Theatre, PACT Zollverein (Essen), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Fondation Cartier (Paris), and many others. Born in Croatia, she moved to the United States as a teenager and spent twenty years there. She currently lives in London, UK.
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