The Means at Hand are the Hands of Others

As the artist and the curator of this project, both living in diaspora, we have each in our own practices been working through some of the concerns raised by this project. By the Means at Hand is a new articulation of our ongoing investigations into systems of interaction and new relational economies between people, objects, and protocols. The following edited conversation arises from the long dialogue we had throughout the production process.

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Vlatka, I’d like to start with a question posed by the title of your project: What are “the means at hand”? How does an interest in the economy of means play out not only in this project but in your practice in general?

I often work with what’s at hand, in terms of what is around in a physical sense:
reclaimed materials, found objects, detritus of urban or industrial processes, leftovers of my own previous projects. For me there’s a politics in this—an ecological impulse, if you like. There’s a tendency to recycle, to engage remains and residues. Alongside this ecological aspect, I often use the recycling of materials from a site as a way of shoring up or guaranteeing a dialogue with a context. For the October Salon in Belgrade in 2012, for example, I made an installation that reused detritus and materials salvaged from or around the exhibition venue, a former Geodetic Institute. Similarly, for the 11th Istanbul
Biennale, I used materials found on site within a former school building; in Portland, Oregon, in a disused bowling alley; and for Malta Festival in Poznan, Poland, I staged a durational performance in what used to be a slaughterhouse.

What is “at hand” for me can mean what is already there physically, but it can also mean what is already happening in terms of systems or social structures. I often go back to Georges Perec’s proposal from his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974) that one should force oneself to look more closely—“more stupidly” he calls it—at the world. And to look again at any situation or material, even if you think you’ve seen it already. It’s about stepping out of habitual modes of looking, getting past the kind of snow-blindness we can have to the world around us.

Going into projects I often tell myself that all the information I need to make a work is already there if I look closely enough. Not that I’m already in the possession of that information, but quite the opposite, that it will have to be derived from the things in front of me. I need to make myself look and look again in order to get to the ideas I want to deal with. There’s a process of excavation from my encounters with sites, places, objects, systems, or structures, as if each circumstance or element is a question I am first trying to form and then trying to answer.

Often, I am looking for “what can be done” in a particular situation, what demands to be done. I’m also thinking (particularly in relation to objects and architecture) what might things or sites want to happen or be done there. My process is a form of listening. Foregrounding or rearranging what’s already there in a context becomes a way for me to think about transforming or questioning a place and its assumptions, using spatial reorganisation and intervention to make new propositions in response to what I have found, or to rethink social relations that might be inscribed or assumed in a place.

When I was first thinking about this particular project and a title, what I had in mind with “the means at hand” were these improvised methods of transporting artworks: the way the works have to piggyback onto other journeys. Now, a few months in, I think it can also refer to people, and not just infrastructures. The means at hand are the hands of others: the many hands involved in making works, and in delivering drawings to and from Venice.

The means at hand also invoke the feminist praxis of working with what is there, not being precious about working with broken tools, and “swinging it” in different ways, often against all odds… I guess this also has to do with salvaging, mending, repairing, and not least by the means of institutionalised friendship.

Working with what is at hand and coming up with improvised solutions is linked to conditions of precarity and scarcity: making things happen with limited resources. I’m interested in the reality of the restriction but also in the metaphorical potential of it, that idea of doing lots with little.

There’s certainly a political inflection to my choices across my practice, in terms of materials, approaches, and forms. And I do think about this work, and my work in general, as feminist. In the sense of using the biennale not as a platform to articulate a single author position, but instead to create an invitational, cooperative frame. The decision to create a network, a conversation. Also, in the sense that it privileges the quotidian, the idea of human-scale contact and dialogue over and above monumentality. In the sense that it fills a national pavilion with works of artists from all over the world. In the sense that it de-centres, taking or making a different kind of space and time. In the sense that the work is an evolving process rather than an object. In the sense that it has concerns with sustainability and recycling and with small-scale acts of making do, and in the sense that it deals with reciprocation, with one-to-one exchange.

At this point, we know a lot and, at the same time, very little about the project we are talking about. You are setting up a framework and inviting others to join you in making it happen, so there are a lot of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. You often use this methodology of devising rules and structures that host different forms of improvisation. In this case, however, there seems to be more at stake, not only in terms of the scale of the project but also in terms of an unprecedented trust in the collective effort, solidarity, and mutual support…?

As a form of social exchange, By the Means at Hand absolutely connects to ideas around trustfulness, solidarity, and mutual support; it relies on these structures for its realisation. The project activates small-scale human connections to achieve its goals, tapping into the daily lives and travels of many people who are currently unknown to me: friends of friends, strangers to me, who will act as couriers, bringing work by hand to the pavilion. In this way the project connects to the capacity humans have for making do. It’s something that foreigners are often forced to do, to find informal ways to achieve objectives, circumventing official systems in favour of makeshift ones that operate through the goodwill and generosity of others.

Often my performative and installation works take the form of improvisations within structures or processes I’ve established in advance. I’m drawn to working in this way. There’s a proposition made, a set of rules for how things might work or for how to inhabit the structure—and then, there’s a leap in the dark….

For me the interest is always in the ways in which improvisation—innovating in response to restriction—produces new possibilities, the unexpected. I’m looking for the articulation, insight, or knowledge that one might not have been capable of reaching any other way. For some projects, I’m the one inhabiting and navigating these frameworks, playing and pushing to investigate what can be done; other times, I invite others to participate or contribute in different ways.

In a sense, the work happens in the zone between what’s been defined and what’s been left open, and I try to create a dynamic balance between these things. I don’t want the structures I use to be too tight, so that what transpires is overly prescribed or redundant, but nor do I want a chaotic free-for-all. The cohesion and the pleasure of the work comes from a dance with the restrictions. The idea holds, the frame holds… but its presence permits and demands invention.

When I’m working alone (on performative projects like This Here and That There, 2007-2018 and Unhinged, 2010, for example) I often set quite severe restrictions or frames. I like the limits, not as a prison, but because they create a space in which I can be free. A space in which I can lean into particular questions and ideas. Even in this project there is a quite severe restriction for me in producing this large body of A4 collage/ drawings—interventions made into printouts of photos of Venice I take with my phone. I know that these limitations will probably frustrate me as the months go on, but I trust that the frustration will occasion discoveries, new approaches. The limit and the zone of possibility are intimately linked.

It seems to me that this approach to limitations echoes in your openness to fragility, a quality at the very heart of By the Means at Hand.

Fragility is an important part of my practice. Many of my sculptural works, installations, and collages look provisionally assembled, like they’re only temporarily held together. In some works, I invoke fragility by placing objects in precarious relation to each other or to their environments—balancing things on top of each other or on the edges of physical structures, places from which they might easily fall and break. My interest in fragility has to do with the material properties of objects and spaces, but it also works in a metaphorical register, as an index of the fragility of the world, of our presence in it.

What interests me as well is that fragility or precariousness in the work makes for a dynamic performative relation with the viewer. Encountering works like Balance Beam, 2015-2020, or Peripheral Awareness, 2014, produces a tangibly different quality of movement from viewers, where the anxiety of the object in peril transfers to the spectator.

Other times in my work the fragility is manifested through the construction of these loose structures for encounter. I have realised several projects over the years that take the form of invitational frameworks, and there is always an element of chance or unpredictability built into the system for them. These set in motion different dialogic processes, but don’t try to police the ways in which those processes will play out. The structures are fragile in the sense that they rely on the people inhabiting them to make decisions that somehow “look after” the structure, that keep it from collapsing or fragmenting too much.

By the Means at Hand is indeed a tenuous proposition, and its realisation in Venice depends entirely on artists accepting my invitation. And of course, beyond that, there are all kinds of external factors that will affect how the project will unfold. There are so many contingencies when it comes to journeys, to moving objects and bodies across distances and across borders.

Talking about moving objects and bodies across distances, we should touch upon the ecological aspects of using the means at hand. In the context of contemporary art, the means (including the ecological ramifications of international exhibition making) are often foreclosed. In your project not only is the ecological footprint of moving objects across distances subsumed by the movement of bodies that are already on the move, but their trajectories and logistics are fully exposed and given central stage in the project.

We do not use any shipping or freighting for the works in By the Means at Hand; all of our transport is parasitic. But the fact that we can realise this project with works coming to Venice from all over the world serves to underline the large amount of international travel that happens around a biennial such as this. We’re all aware how entangled things are; even though our project doesn’t generate any additional shipping, it still sits in a carbon-heavy context. What’s important to us is that through its modus operandi, By the Means at Hand tries to encourage people to think creatively about sustainable, alternative solutions to logistics and production challenges.

One of the aspects of your work that I have always been fascinated with is how it is permeated with joy and humour alongside a sense of struggle, in different ways and forms of coming together. Could you speak about the role of humour in your work and how it informs and plays out in this project?

Humour in my work often comes from the solutions or responses to difficult situations or limits I’ve set up. The restrictions I establish can be brutal in their way, and the means I give myself to work with are often deliberately impoverished. The humour and the pleasure come from the unlikely innovative solution offered into an unpromising situation, as well as from following a logic to its end. For instance, the unruly sticks taped together to “support” the ceiling in my work Reinforcements, 2016-23. Or my cardboard installation Ground Coil, 2011, which creates a dense spiral on the floor. As a sculptural intervention, it follows its own logic, spiralling out from the centre of a room until there is no floor-space left. In the process, it transforms from a circular form to a rectilinear one, an act of adjusting to or parasiting on the architectural container. There’s a visual delight in the excessive presence of this floor-based construction. But it also presents gallery visitors with a problem, forcing them to the edges of the room, challenging the utility of the space. People standing around the sculpture have to move around it in a circle whenever someone wants to leave the room. The work—even though it is a static object—choreographs the movement of those standing around it, whose circling around the work in turn perceptually activates the spiralling form.

Thinking about By the Means at Hand, there is a foolhardiness to the project I think, and with it a form of playful irreverence towards more established or straightforward ways and means. Having to find someone who is already going to Venice in order to ask them to take a drawing with them in their luggage is arguably not the most efficient or expedient way of getting work delivered for an exhibition! But the roundabout alternative methodology in the project offers a critique of the normative; the everyday insistence on the efficient, the utilitarian, or the convenient is replaced by something at once more baroque and more human-scale. The project draws attention to, and celebrates, another way of being in the world—one that has or makes time, one that takes an interest in the company of the road and the pleasure of the diversion as much as in finding the quickest route to a destination.

And there is joy of course that comes from getting something done in spite of, or in dialogue with, obstacles and the Venice work plays to that.

One thing I think is important to note here is that the alternative forms of logistics that the project uses are already in operation around the world. The improvised transport methods at the heart of our project are established vernacular practices that people often use to get things to their friends and relatives living in cities or countries far away. They are historically established practices born out of social dispersal, migration, and displacement, which typically happen for economic reasons or for social mobility. In this sense my work is about recognising an existing form of practice—something that already operates in a particular set of circumstances—and relocating it, applying it to a new context, in a spirit of mischief and upheaval. This act of relocation is another source of humour in this project, I think, in that its ways and means, as familiar as we are with them, are deployed in the wrong place. We’re using the wrong tool for the job, the wrong method for the context. Where works typically arrive for the Venice Biennale via the expensive machinery of art handlers and dedicated shippers, there’s a quiet subversion in the insistence that the works will arrive tucked in the hand luggage of someone’s sister, aunt, ex-boyfriend, or work colleague who happens to be visiting for a few days. The improvised practice lacks the requisite seriousness and efficiency for the context of Venice, one of the most visible contemporary art exhibitions in the world. It’s as if the project misunderstands the situation, and, as ever, there’s a comic, subversive force to that quite deliberate misunderstanding. Earlier we spoke about the transport of works for the project as acts of repurposing, but for me they are also acts of “mispurposing”—which become a source of humour and joy, as well as small instances of resistance. Using wrongness as a strategy also serves to highlight the expectations and demands inherent in a situation. The “incorrect” approach to a situation produces tensions, which can help us see the ridiculous and sometimes violent assumptions that are often hidden in the habitual uses of a space or system.

The intricate spatial and temporal arrangements of many of your sculptural works strike me as a still shot of a choreography enfolding in time, a captured movement. Could this project be similarly read? The enfolding of By the Means of Hand is choreographed from both up close and afar: from the ultra-local Cannaregio area of Venice to wherever the contributing artists happen to be. Could you talk about the choreographic aspects of the project and how they translate into the formal elements in the exhibition space?

I’ve been thinking about choreography a lot in relation to this project. There’s choreography of movement over geographic distances. Each drawing makes a journey, a trajectory from A to B, or from A to B to C, and it’s tempting to imagine these journeys as lines on the map. I’m enjoying visualising these large sweeping movements: drawings and people coming from many different locations to a temporary focal point that is Venice, and from there going outward again, back to all the originating points. A two-way sequence.

Then there are choreographies of bodies and objects moving together through transport networks, traveling together on trains, planes, boats, accompanying each other on their journeys to a shared destination. I’m thinking how people who have agreed to take works to Venice have taken on a dual role as courier and as temporary custodian. This morning I met with an artist who brought a drawing to London on the train to give to me to take to Venice. As we parted, she said, “I’m so relieved now that I’ve handed it you; it’s now your responsibility.” She’d been holding the drawing in her hand the whole train journey as she didn’t want to risk losing it. I like imagining people clutching these flat objects they are transporting, moving across distances in this way as a body/object coupling, as strange dance partners. These hybrid human-objects are reminders of some of my earliest works, collages and photographs which showed figures (often my own body) merged with objects or elements of landscape. In the pavilion itself, we’re working with a different type of choreography. I’ve asked all the participating artists to take a photo of their hands as they hand their artwork over to their courier. These images form a kind of a landscape of hands: hands interacting with other hands, always captured in the moment of passing packages between them.

These hands printouts are displayed on thin plywood zig-zag forms. I have for some time been working with what I’m calling “forms of ongoingness,” sculptural forms that conjure a sense of continuous motion and that are associated with a transfer of energy or information. In my research I have been looking at wave formations, visualisations of radio frequencies and abstracted representations of handwriting. As well as looking like a cartoonish spatial drawing of the sea, the zig-zag forms created for the pavilion also embody the dynamics of up and down, back and forth, coming and going, call and response. With their invocation of infinite unfolding, and of tides, they reflect the processes at the heart of this project while also expressing something about the experience of social migration, whereby leaving and returning, arriving and departing can be ongoing, concurrent processes that are sometimes hard to tell apart. (Though for some folks there is no going back.)

We can also of course talk about choreography in terms of the processes of facilitating social relations: the exchange of drawings being a mechanism that prompts meetings, that brings people together (in a physical sense at least). This aspect of the project is important to me. One can think about routes, trajectories, lines, and journeys, but there’s a level of abstraction in this overview or logistics perspective. But the encounters between people are on another level: intimate, human-scale, unknowable. These kinds of conversations and meetings are inside the project but also exceed and escape it. The project does not try to capture or represent them.

What is the relation between the process and the different iterations of the exhibition one actually encounters in the space of the pavilion? Because in effect, you could say that By the Means at Hand also functions as a series of group exhibitions, as you will be selecting objects and presenting artworks from what, over time, not only will constitute an archive of the exchanges of artworks that took place, but will also eventually become an art collection (albeit, one created “laterally,” by means at hand, with no money capital beyond the costs of securing logistics and storage.) You have insisted from the beginning that you view this eventual collection as primarily a remainder of a social exchange. Could you say more on that?

To my mind, we’re not setting out to build a collection, but a kind of collection will emerge along the way as an outcome of the process. Works that invited artists send to me in Venice will be a central component of the exhibition in the pavilion. Over time they will form a growing archive reflecting on diasporic experience. That’s important to me. But this assembly of artworks is not an articulated end in and of itself. My interest is also in the process: the conversation with and between artists, the meetings of artists and couriers, the journeys of the works.

The exhibition in the pavilion brings together different traces of these performative exchanges. It’s envisioned as a continually evolving dynamic install. I will be arranging and rearranging the components as the project unfolds: as I make new work on site, as works by other artists arrive, and as my works in turn are sent out. This work is not a single static object, but rather a system in performative flux, subject to shifts in tone and content, accelerations and slowdowns produced by the ongoing operation of the project.

The gesture of rearranging of course arises from spatial restriction. It’s a practical solution but one that I think has broader resonance. The rearrangement for me is linked to a rejection of the idea that things (relations, systems, situations) are ever finished or locked. It works instead with a conviction that the world—social space in particular—is reconfigurable.

The project produces an exhibition, an artwork made of artworks, but it’s also on this other level an emerging network, a social sculpture. There is a form of togetherness in this, a small form of mutuality. It’s not a political upheaval, but it is a dispersed activation of collective energy. As an artwork, the project doesn’t describe this mutuality so much as manifest it, bringing it into material form in social space.

In a way, By the Means at Hand is itself a fluctuating form of alternating dematerialisation and rematerialisation not so much of an art object but of an artwork as an art exhibition, thus perhaps resonating less with the classic repertoire of themes and tactics of the 1960s and 1970s artistic practice, but rather continuing the lineage of institutional critique “by other means”?

I certainly have questions about the framework of the national pavilions, built as it is on the principle that  belonging to “nations” is what rules our rights, freedoms, and identities, as well as on the idea that an artist or a group of artists can somehow “represent” a country. As you say, there’s also a form of institutional critique developed in the project “by other means,” linked to its insistence on process rather than product. In a high-stakes context like the Venice Biennale, one might expect an exhibition to be finished and complete at the moment of opening, and to stay fixed throughout the duration of the show. Instead, we have a process of continual flux; a fragile, unstable, ongoing exchange. 

One of the things I’ve been thinking in recent days is how, over the course of the biennale, this exhibition is both forming and coming undone. Works by others are arriving throughout and I’m continually making new works while in residence at the pavilion, and as each work by another artist arrives, I send one of my works back to them. So each arrival prompts a departure.

In a move that reverses the flow of works to Venice, I’m asking each artist to display the drawing I send to them somewhere in their city, however briefly, however informally. I’m thinking of works placed in the windows of houses or apartments facing the street, in the windshields of parked cars, on neighbourhood noticeboards, or on the doors of offices and workspaces. In another take on my fascination with unfinishedness, I’m thinking of the works I’m sending to people as echoes of the project that will crop up in other cities, out of context, dispersing the Croatian Pavilion and the exhibition to many geographic locations. I’m also asking artists to photograph my works as they present them in these disparate, remote locations, and to send me the images so that I can also document this dispersal in the pavilion itself. I do think of the whole project in terms of these calls and responses, actions and echoes across geographical and temporal distance.

I’m very much drawn to the idea of an exhibition as an unstable object. I like making exhibitions and works that change over time, that respond to the conditions in the room, that are affected by the passing of time. I guess I’m drawn to exhibitions and objects that require maintenance, that want you to check in on them, that need an amount of looking after… Perhaps it’s because these processes make palpable the need for our presence. I tend to think of it also as a small way of shifting the power dynamics between me as a maker, someone with agency, and the exhibition as a “thing,” an object of my doing and manipulation. Making an exhibition that will continually “want” something from you gives it agency; it places me as the artist and it as an entity into a dialogic relation, co-present in a shared situation. I’m reminded here of a line by the writer Donald Barthelme who describes the writer as “the work’s way of getting itself written.” It’s a beautiful idea that shifts us away from an understanding of an artist as someone with all the agency and intentionality, and instead invites us to understand the process of making as one of listening, of creating as a form of call and response. I like the idea of the artist in service of the work, rather than the other way around.

I want to talk a bit about that invisible iceberg of actual labour of creating the structures and dealing with restrictions—in other words, about that which remains mostly hidden behind the joyful interface of spontaneity and improvisational immediacy. There is certainly the aspect of simply showing up every day, to receive and process the arriving works, to make your own collages that you will be sending to the artists abroad. There is also the labour of cataloguing, indexing, meeting couriers… How do you see the relationship of your own labour to the greater constellation of objects and processes that the pavilion hosts?  You seem to be wilfully transcending clearly defined roles of artist, archivist, caretaker, invigilator…?

As I said, I often work with rule-based frameworks and with durational structures, and those are often based on routines and discipline and a commitment, stubbornness even, to seeing something through. In a sense, By the Means at Hand can be seen as a durational performance unfolding slowly over the course of seven months. In this aspect it relates to my work To See Stars over Mountains, which was a year-long project in 2021 whereby I made one work per day for every day of the year. There isn’t a regularity to the schedule here, though. The daily rhythms will be determined to a large degree by what happens: who comes in, what they bring. How many of my works I need to be making as the project goes along will directly depend on how many drawings by others I receive. The same goes for these other tasks: cataloguing, logging, tracing, printing, arranging, and rearranging. I imagine there will be periods when I will be quite busy with all the jobs, and some other periods when things will be slow.

Since I’m living in the pavilion for the length of the show, it will be interesting to see how the processes of making new work and of looking after the exhibition relate to the daily routine, to the rhythms of waking up, of going to sleep, of making food, of sitting in the garden. Of course, I know what it is to be making work at home, intertwined and entangled with everyday life, but this will be the first time I will be living around the clock inside and alongside an exhibition. I’m very much looking forward to the kinds of repeated looking this coexistence will allow for.

With more “static” exhibitions, which present more or less finished objects or artefacts, the preparatory work can be happily left out of the picture. It’s interesting but not essential to know how a painting or a sculpture gets shipped! But in a project like this one, the preparatory work is part of the work itself. The system by which the works arrive and are exchanged is not an invisible back-room process; it is made explicitly visible. In this sense, By the Means at Hand is focused not just on arriving artworks, but also on the prompts, invitations, processes, encounters, exchanges, and journeys that get them there.

In a recent project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, you were working with the artworks from the museum’s collection, arranging them based on their formal properties to question, as you write in the accompanying text, “the affinity and belonging, order and disorder, and the criteria and framing involved in any act of grouping, organising, and connecting in the world we inhabit.” You named the project Good Company. Your work for the Venice Biennale brings different “objects” into the room, but this assembly also includes original artworks by other artists. These objects are, in a way, subordinate to the vulnerable dynamic of their coming together, subtly destabilising their ontological stability and social status as autonomous artworks.

I’ve been thinking about these things a lot as I’ve been trying to answer some of the practical questions related to how the works are displayed in the room.

All the works that invited artists are sending to me are part of a constellation, but they are also present in the pavilion as individual artworks which visitors will engage with on their own terms. I don’t think that individual works will be subsumed by the frame. I think they might rather gain something by being placed in this space of dialogue and relation. All works brought together become part of a conversation, one that explores different people’s experience of foreignness. It’s true that the smaller conversations between different works sharing space with each other will probably affect how we see them, and that in different company, they might be read differently, but I think each will also retain its own resonance.

My work always in one way or another constructs and rearranges relations between things sharing space. Spatial relations have consequences for social relations; reorganising one impacts on the other. All acts of assembly in my work are interested in what happens when different voices, narratives, presences, histories, etc., are brought together and encountered alongside one another—whether we are talking about bringing together human participants or else, objects, materials, texts, images. These are questions about the sharing of space, but they are also questions of community, of belonging, of being together—and therefore social and political questions.

We have both been living as foreigners in different lands and different circumstances for decades. This is also true of the artists contributing to the project, as well as many of the writers in this publication. While experiencing foreignness is far from anthropologically universal, there are shared or at least relatable tools, tactics of survival, modes of living and joy in situations when “there is always somewhere else”: when our daily life is determined by states of loose belonging, of being terminally liminal, temporary, transitional. I am wondering how these states might end up reflecting in the objects sent from different places in the world that will finally form this assembly. What are your expectations regarding the works other artists will send you?

In my correspondence with the artists, I’ve sent them a list of questions to try to anticipate those they might have about the project. In a way, these reflected my own questions—the things I felt needed specific clarity and nuance as I was developing the project—and one of them was precisely this: What do you mean by “diaspora experience”? My initial impulse was not to answer this question in any kind of concrete way. I didn’t want to overdetermine what I might get from people, so I only sent a line or two, leaving things open to interpretation. But when pressed further (I pressed myself!),
I made a list of some of the things I’m thinking when I think “diaspora experience,” and I sent this list to the artists who wanted additional prompts:

I’m thinking about “foreignness.” About migrations. About journeys. About leaving and returning. About the “ongoingness” of going that is part of the immigrant experience. About different reasons and different circumstances around going / leaving / returning / not returning. About ideas of home. Multiple homes. About social dispersal and family dispersal. About belonging and nonbelonging. About immigration and visas. About navigating structures and systems. About improvisation and making do. About borders and obstacles. About language. About translation. About invisibility and hyper visibility. About passing. About memory and forgetting. About displacement, about acts of repositioning, about everyday life. Thinking about solidarity, and about informal support structures. About limited resources, and about inventing ways to get by. Thinking about victories, big and small, and about failures. About giving up and about persisting. About lostness. I could also be thinking about the ways in which this thing of “being a foreigner” overlaps with other things: race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, age, cultural history, etc.

One of the artists I met the other day said that she liked receiving this list because for many of the things it includes, it also includes their opposite. I think a lot about that space between a thing and its opposite—not in terms of dichotomies, but in terms of the vast space in between that they contain, that liminal space that we are trying to talk about with this project.

I’m heartened by the generous responses to my invitation by so many artists and excited to see the works people will send. I know they’ll open our thinking about this project and its processes in ways we can’t predict. I’m also mindful that the pavilion will gather a dense collection of works by artists who have very diverse lived experiences and perspectives. I’m looking forward to spending time with the insights and the thinking that will come from this dispersed conversation.

It is important to me is that the artists I’ve invited to participate in the project come from different places. By the Means at Hand is a project for the Croatian Pavilion, but the logic whereby different people, their narratives, experiences, and works have been brought together to share space doesn’t follow categories of national identity or belonging. Instead, we want to focus on friendship, solidarity, mutual support, and shared struggle as principles that bring (and hold) people together. As diverse as all the artists and their experiences are bound to be, they can all belong here to an extent, together and alongside one another in whatever states of similarity, difference, accord, and discord. I said earlier that this project is a fragile proposition because it depends entirely on people coming through. But for that same reason I think it’s also a solid proposition because at the end of the day, what we can rely on is other people, and By the Means at Hand embodies that faith in the strength and steadfastness of human connection.

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 a wide range of international institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; PEER London; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; Hessel Museum – Bard Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; MARTa Herford Museum, Herford; Stroom, The Hague; Bergen Kunsthall; the Kitchen and MoMA PS1, both in New York City. Her work has been shown at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, the 11th Istanbul Biennale, and the 16th Architecture Biennale in Venice. Her performances have been commissioned and presented internationally by venues including HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin; LIFT – London International Festival of Theatre; PACT Zollverein in Essen; Kaaitheater in Brussels; KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen in Hannover; and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, among others. Her recent fiction has been published by Nightjar Press, Vassar Review, and minor literature(s); and her artist’s book To See Stars over Mountains, which gathers 365 works on paper produced one per day over the course of a year, was published in 2022 by PEER and Unstable Object. Born in Croatia, she moved to the United States as a teenager and spent twenty years there. She lives in London, UK.

Antonia Majaca is an art historian, curator, and writer based between Venice and Berlin, whose work incorporates art history, political theory, epistemology, and intellectual history. She was one of the curators of “Parapolitics – Cultural Freedom and the Cold War” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2017 and is the author of the itinerant project “Feminist Takes.” She was the principal researcher of “The Incomputable” at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art of the Graz University of Technology, and is the editor of  Incomputable Earth: Digital Technologies and the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury, 2024).