Extensions

Extensions is Vlatka Horvat's solo exhibition at MSU - Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, part of the Kožarić Studio "Laboratory for Reviving” exhibition cycle, curated by Radmila Iva Jankovic.

“Laboratory for Reviving” exhibition cycle has been held every year since the Kožarić Studio moved from Medulićeva Street to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artists or curators present projects that find an origin, inspiration or a link in the rich holdings of the Kožarić Studio. Always willing to start from the beginning, using dynamic processes of transforming “garbage into gold” and vice versa in order to strip his own works of the aura of untouchability; the artefacts in Kožarić’s Studio often got a chance at a new life.

In the performative gestures of Vlatka Horvat, which are often enacted in situ, through the ever shifting dynamic relations between architecture, the body and objects, but also speaking to a wider context, it will not be difficult to recognize points of connection, even resonance. The works in the exhibition Extensions – as well as many of the artist’s earlier ensembles – were mostly created using rejected, dysfunctional items. “By modifying and adapting these found objects it is as if I’m extending their expiry date, whilst at the same time literally spatially extending or repeating some element of their form, or some aspect of the space they occupy,” says the artist. “I am drawn to the ways in which objects ‘improved’ in this way embody a kind of a paradox – they are extended or enlarged in space, but this process of expansion simultaneously compromises their function, transforming them from usable, ‘useful’ items into puzzling objects caught in the processes of concurrent fragmentation and multiplication.” The purpose of these performative gestures is a transformation that creates a certain tension and activates imaginative processes in multiple directions, both emotional and associative. Objects that were in their former life associated with acts and conditions of ascent, rest, fitting-in and adapting… through these artistic gestures which emphasise some of their key spatial or functional features using a set of witty do-it-yourself strategies, appear here as absurd reminders of an almost existential state of stuckness, marked by an inability to hold on to things or to put them in order, so that we may finally get going, or else, stop.

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