Above Us Only Sky

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 draws fragile yet consistent lines of connection between the objects, the space(s) they inhabit, and the social, physical, and discursive architectures that surround them.

Vlatka’s interventions are careful and playful at the same time, exploring ways to transform her materials. She brings elements together, reuses them, or disrupts them to open them up to their contexts in new ways or break them free from their previous modes of being. Within her process, the things she works with take on a kind of auxiliary life, moving beyond their utility to undergo an almost alchemical transformation in status and purpose. Objects find meaning not in the generic identity they carry with them into a situation, but rather through a renewed or reinvented relation to the viewer that expresses a poetic underlying potential. Meaning in these works is elusive, and there is often a feeling that something is still emerging, yet to be fully realized. There is also often a sense of aspiration, as if the objects themselves might be reaching toward something—a state of being or becoming, something just out of reach, something that is not, or not yet. Through assembly, the artist makes objects support one another—leaning them against or propping them atop one another—and through these new spatial relations, we view them in another light, even if just for a moment. Her art can be seen as a way of both accepting and refusing what things are, perhaps also a way of both accepting and refusing what people are or what situations in which they find themselves are. It is this double move of treating things as being both true to themselves and totally transformed at the same time that makes the work so unique.

There is humor in Vlatka’s practice, sometimes even a little absurdity, but the core seems to us to lie in its openness to the potential in things that already are. In a time when the idea of the new is more tired than ever, and when the act of producing even useful objects must be weighed against the cost to the planet and all its life-forms, a focus on the tolerance and transformation of what already exists is something to be celebrated in an artist. Vlatka’s ability to draw new possibilities from the context and material conditions of the world imbues her practice with relevance for both the current moment and the foreseeable future. Beyond her extensive dialogue with objects in sculpture and installation, her work seamlessly bridges the performative, the photographic, and the videographic, bringing together the personal and the political. Across these formats, there is a simplicity of gesture and composition that is in harmony with this idea of tolerance and transformation. Vlatka redefines social and physical constraints as fragile advantages and opportunities of sorts for invention and change. In project after project, she sidesteps or rises above the misery of frustration and (self-)exclusion that can sometimes overwhelm the relation many people have to the world around them.

As curators, we have been lucky to be in dialogue with Vlatka for more than two decades. Our collaboration has followed a meandering path, like so many of the choreographies of objects and bodies in the artist’s own practice. We have maintained a stubborn contact, sometimes varying in intensity and passing through different stages. This journey has found us battling obstacles and circumstances together in international biennales, in shows in our home in Zagreb, and elsewhere. The work and experiences we have shared, though full of gaps and fragilities, have always returned and renewed our energy for the struggle ahead. Every one of our now many meetings has been a source of exchange and support, and often—again as with her work—the outcome was not obvious from the beginning, as the results were both tangible and intangible.

Our first collaborations took place within the modest circumstances of our early years in Gallery Nova, a city-owned space in Zagreb. This is also where Vlatka had her first solo exhibition in 2005. Titled “Wrong Way,” it showcased the wide scope of her practice, comprising sculpture, drawing, performance, photography, video, and writing. To accompany the exhibition, we produced a small booklet of her photo series Hiding, in which the artist depicted her own body in unexpected relations—placed behind or sometimes almost merged with different objects in her studio. Already at this early stage, the contradictory, doubled logic of her work was fully present, the act of hiding becoming an act of self-exposure.

Through all these years of collaboration, we have witnessed how the artist’s approach in both gallery and nongallery spaces continually generates unexpected and dynamic situations. For the 11^th International Istanbul Biennial, which we curated in 2009, Vlatka made a set of interventions in a classroom of a former Greek school that had been closed when much of the Greek population was driven out of the city in the 1960s. Vlatka brought an aspect of that heavy history to life by focusing on what remained—the space of the classroom—which she emphasized through a repetition of some of its formal elements and architectural motifs. For her room-size installation For Example, she deconstructed other objects related to the classroom’s former use, deploying cheap materials—pieces of foam, wood, cardboard, and glass—shaped into sculpturally striking compositions that evoked what might have been. Throughout 2016, amid a brief but destructively harsh period of right-wing rule in Croatia’s ministry of culture, we collaborated for a series of exhibitions called “Your Country Doesn’t Exist.” Within this framework, Vlatka showed different versions of Balance Beam, a mesmerizing, tense sculpture consisting of a wooden beam laid horizontally over the backs of two chairs to form a makeshift bridge between them. On top of the beam, the artist placed various round and tubular objects—a ball, marbles, a glass bottle, a globe, a camera lens, etc.—in a precarious balance, a precious state of equilibrium that threatens to collapse at any moment. This apparent tenuousness lent a performative aspect to the installation, requiring viewers to be mindful of their own presence in space, as even a slight tremor might precipitate a minor disaster. The viewers therefore became intensely aware of their own actions and the potential consequences. If any of the objects were to roll off the beam, however, the gallery invigilator would have simply picked the elements up and put them back where they belonged, “repairing” the work without drama or blame. In that sense, Balance Beam is a work that—like many of Vlatka’s recent sculptural pieces—requires ongoing maintenance and attention.

In 2018, we produced an exhibition for Croatia’s Industrial Art Biennial called “On the Shoulders of Fallen Giants.” For this project, Vlatka realized Who Come to Stand, a beautiful site-specific performance set at the entrance to 25 Maj, a former shipyard in Rijeka that had been corruptly privatized (was there ever a noncorrupt privatization?) and then asset-stripped until it was forced to close. The artist herself kept watch over the facility’s proud, monumental statue of a strong shipyard worker holding a model boat in his hands. Vlatka imitated his pose, standing with a bundle of sticks that she had collected at a nearby building site. Over the course of eight hours (a frequent duration of the artist’s performances in public space), the audience members were invited to bring objects whose personal or social significance they wanted to mark in public space and join Vlatka in standing to honor the memory of the workers. This vigil produced moving encounters with former employees of the shipyard who joined the performance, standing alongside the artist and the statue in a show of solidarity among bodies and objects in the past and today.

An aspect of Vlatka’s work that has grown more explicit in recent years is her exploration of the generative possibilities of limitations, whether self-imposed or inherent to specific contexts, environments, circumstances, or ecologies. By amplifying existing elements already present in a site or a social setting, Vlatka draws attention to current conditions while suggesting the possibility of alternative outcomes. Her works invite viewers to scrutinize the relationships between different agents, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. In the context of the ongoing ecosocial crisis, Vlatka’s approach to developing her own artistic ecologies is particularly intriguing. The term artistic ecologies refers to the “ecology of practice,” as defined by Isabelle Stengers[i] : a tool for thinking through what is happening that is inherently non-neutral. This concept resonates within our own practice, most overtly in recent exhibitions at Gallery Nova such as “Artistic Ecologies Every Day,” as well as in our educational initiative WHW Akademija, for which Vlatka has served as a professor. In her own work, these new tools for ecologically led action and thought manifest in the micro-actions she has performed near daily over the past few years. These actions, which take the form of small gestures, personal rituals, and self-imposed tasks, become provisional tools and strategies relevant to a broader understanding of how artistic production can adopt a more ecological stance. Recent examples include the project Ways Across, 2022–, an ongoing series of photographs documenting makeshift bridges constructed from found sticks and planks the artist encountered during daily walks in a small stretch of woods, which she started during the pandemic. The result is a diary of sorts that records the traces of other humans with whom she shares the space of the city. Her ambitious 2021 work To See Stars over Mountains, which comprises 365 works on paper created daily over a year, and her video Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done, 2021, each explore in different ways the interaction of human beings, objects, and the natural world. Both works delve into the process of journeying, revealing it as an impossible endeavor with an unknown and seemingly unattainable destination.

However, the idea of unattainable destinations is not how we would finish this brief account of our collective relationship with Vlatka’s work. If anything, the artist manifests an optimistic persistence and a sometimes almost obsessive drive to circumvent whatever obstacles she encounters with attentiveness, humor, and care. This relentlessly positive attitude is embodied by the piece she realized at the very beginning of our program at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna in 2019, just before the pandemic shutdown. She installed a fragile ladder made of foam beneath a high glass ceiling in the main gallery’s staircase, an obscure but appropriate place to try to attempt an escape. The title of the sculpture was Above Us Only Sky, and despite being unreachable and obviously too frail to support a human body, the improvised ladder leading upward seemed to signal that desire in her work to amplify, transform, and evade the numerous frameworks and structures that economy, society, and identity impose on us, so often obstructing a perspective that might include the sky. Just as in so many of her works, the sculpture created conditions to contemplate the possibilities of escape—from the exhibition, from the institution, from the confines of built space more generally—but also to consider the gallery in a different way: no longer as a site for the realization of individual artistic dreams, but as the shared imaginative exit/opening to something much more profound. In this way, and throughout the years, Vlatka’s work continues to be an inspiration for us: always looking for the possibility to transcend limitations, seeking out the means of a sublime, poetic escape.

[i] Isabelle Stengers, Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices, Culturel Studies Review, volume 11, no. 1. March, 2005, 196.

What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 in Zagreb, based in Berlin, Vienna, and Zagreb. Its founding members are curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. What, how and for whom, the three basic questions of every economic organization, concern the planning, concept, and realization of exhibitions as well as the production and distribution of artworks and the artist’s position in the labor market. These questions formed the title of WHW’s first project dedicated to the 152^nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, in 2000 in Zagreb, and became the motto of WHW’s work and the title of the collective. Over the years, WHW developed projects in different geographical and cultural contexts and on different institutional scales, inspired by queer-feminist, anti-fascist and decolonizing ideas and with a goal to set impulses for aesthetic and ideological debates in the field of contemporary art. From 2003 to 2023, the WHW collective ran a program at the city-owned gallery Gallery Nova at Teslina 7 in Zagreb. Currently the Gallery is operating without a permanent base, relying on being hosted by various local cultural organizations. While searching for a new address, Gallery’s program is exploring possibilities of a gallery as mental and nomadic space, as well as contingencies of its own unfinished institutionalization. In 2018, WHW launched a new international study program for emerging artists called WHW Akademija, based in Zagreb. From 2019 to 2024, Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović have been working as artistic directors of Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, while activities in Zagreb have continued under leadership of Ana Dević.