I I want to start with your hands. They are bending sheets of aluminium as you kneel or squat on the floor of a stone building in Tunis in January 2024. Or typing notes for a project into a phone. Dragging a battered folding measure as you walk, so that the end scores a line…

Latvia, will you have me? Poland, Finland, I’m like you,                 will you have me? My eyes are small like yours,                 will you have me? I’m all fight and no muscle I’m mouth and no language All work and all horizon I have to rest I’m tired please                 As though I’ve lived for…

I Dear Vlatka, As I write to you, I begin noticing the hands moving across the keyboard. The leaps and coordinated actions of a group of fingers working in concert to form a word or a sentence; the stutters and long hesitations of a phalanx trailing behind; the pulsing of a tendon under repetitious daily…

Certain strategies and tactics emerge as creative counterpoints integral to particular communities’ survival in grey and black economies, postwar economies, cities where state or municipal infrastructures have collapsed to the point of nonusability, and places that are systematically exclusionary of certain ethnicities and socioeconomic groups. Many such tactics may be used in less urgent contexts,…

In January 1992, I left my hometown of Sarajevo for a trip to the United States. I was supposed to return on May 2 of that same year, but that was the day the siege fully closed around the city. I did not fly out of Chicago and started my next life there. I watched…

For almost a century now, Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) has offered a powerful meditation on authorship, directed at someone who is read by the world—who finds a voice within it—as a female subject: someone historically destined to venture surreptitiously into the uncertain space of creation, someone whose place at a…

What does it mean to do something by employing the means at hand, as the title of Vlatka Horvat’s project suggests? If I wanted to write this text in such a way, would this be an easy task? Could I simply bend over slightly and lazily reach out toward the next thing that presents itself,…

In 1942, the German Jew Curt Bloch started an underground magazine from a tiny loft in the Dutch city of Enschede, where he was living in hiding from the Nazi police. Called Het Onderwater Cabaret—“Underwater Cabaret”—after an anti-Fascist radio broadcast of the time, the magazine used satirical poems, songs, and photomontages to poke fun at…

Vlatka Horvat’s work often begins with an everyday object or, at least, objects that might at first glance seem ordinary. Sometimes she photographs these elements as they are; more often she exhibits them in arrangements as sculpture or installation, constellations that unsettle each item in some way. By means of these subtle spatial manipulations, Vlatka…

The first I heard of Vlatka Horvat’s idea for the Croatian Pavilion was, appropriately, through someone else. They’d bumped into her at a gig in central London by Australia’s avant-garde jazz trio, the Necks. They explained how she was going to invite artists from across the world to send a work of art to her…