I have been invited to contribute a text for a publication on the work of Vlatka Horvat, to coincide with her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bergen in Norway, at the end of January 2011. Horvat has invited a group of individuals – who she has worked with in the past – to each write a short text or a fragment about one of her works. Each person is invited to choose a single work or a strand of work to write about – it might be a response, an analysis, a point of departure to talk about broader ideas or connections. The publication is conceived as a collection of voices and responses, structured as a notebook of sorts, that attempts to speak to the cataloguing nature of much of Horvat’s work. The work I am proposing to focus on is This Here and That There.
The publication coincides with Horvat's exhibition, AS OPPOSED TO THE FRONT, BACK, TOP AND BOTTOM, at Bergen Kunsthall.
BERGEN KUNSTHALL – NO.5:
AS OPPOSED TO THE FRONT, BACK, TOP AND BOTTOM
21 JANUARY – 20 FEBRUARY
Vlatka Horvat’s exhibition can be seen as a stage in an ongoing process for the artist, since she is here continuing her long-term iterative investigations of spatial qualities and relations. With a well established artistic strategy, where the method involves picking the existing apart, cutting out, folding/bending or weaving together photographic, textual or physical elements, she creates new, fictive potential for the relationships between space, body and object.
For the exhibition in NO.5 Horvat will be showing a major installation, as well as several new series of works on paper. Thematically, she has focused her exploration around the concepts of ‘the edge’ and ‘the centre’ as both spatial/physical and conceptual phenomena. Inherent in this is the idea that edges connote boundaries and limitations, whether in physical conditions like place and space, or in social relations in the form of normative expectations of interpersonal behaviour. Not least, the edge constitutes a concrete, defining entity when it comes to image production, since the framing does a great deal to determine the reading and the status of the picture. What is inside and what is outside? Where is the beginning and where is the end of an object, an image, or space? The notion of the centre meanwhile brings about a range of related concerns, as physical and spatial centrality tends to evoke questions about power and agency. Working through ideas related to the middle and the margins, the center and the periphery in this exhibition allows Horvat to explore both the visual economy of images, as well as the broader political and social implications of reconfiguration of images and space.