curated by: Ana Dević/WHW
Friday, 09/09/2022, Conversation with artists and guided tour 19.30h
Exhibition opening: 20.00h
Gallery hours: Tue– Fri 12–20h; Saturday: 11–14h
Artistic Ecologies Every Day initiates a dialogue between two artists – Vlatka Horvat and Marina Naprushkina – whose distinctive practices bridge practical and speculative, personal and political, artistic and activist sensibilities. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary and collaborative formats, both artists work to reconfigure social and physical limitations in their immediate surroundings. The exhibition brings together their recent and newly produced works across painting, installation, photography and video, including also a workshop framed as part of the project. Artistic Ecologies Every Day refers to “an ecology of practice” that Isabelle Stengers defines as “a tool for thinking through what is happening” – a tool that is “never neutral”. The exhibition approaches artistic ecologies as a process involving actions one does every day. These actions – in the form of small gestures, personal rituals and self-imposed tasks, become provisional tools and strategies relevant for wider communities.
Marina Naprushkina works largely outside institutional spaces, in cooperation with communities and activist organizations. At Gallery Nova she is exhibiting a newly produced series of colorful large-scale paintings Birds with the People (2022), inspired by maljavanka – traditional amateur paintings created by women’s communities in Belarus, Ukraine and Poland, intended to decorate domestic spaces. Reinterpreting this format, Naprushkina combines motifs of traditional folklore with references to the wave of ongoing anti-regime protests in Belarus in 2020 and 2021 which have not stopped for a single day since. She is also showing a series of prints – Every Day, School Books and a video Future (2020), all of which speak to the emancipatory struggles – ongoing protests, rallies, and strikes – which embody mutual support and solidarity.
Vlatka Horvat works across sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, photography, video and writing. Her work in a variety of contexts often explores generative possibilities of limitations. Self-imposed restrictions, as well as those already operating in particular contexts, sites and circumstances, become guiding principles for her projects which aim to transform the everyday and the habitual. Amplifying what’s already there – as a way of drawing attention to what is currently happening as well as hinting at the possibility of it being otherwise, Horvat’s works invite the viewer to look more closely at the relation between different agents; human and non-human, animate and inanimate. Horvat is exhibiting a newly produced project titled Ways Across (2022), an ongoing series of photographs documenting makeshift bridges made of found sticks and planks, which she has been chancing upon on her daily walks in a small woods. In the downstairs space, Horvat is showing her recent video Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done (2021), which explores the interaction of human beings, objects and the natural world. The work zooms in on the process of journeying, revealed here as an impossible endeavor whose destination is always both unknown and apparently out of reach. The exhibition will also include Horvat’s new sculptural/collage works and her 2022 artist book To See Stars over Mountains, which gathers 365 works on paper she has made one per day over the course of a year.
Based on an ecological approach to the materiality of artistic production, both artists make use of cheap and readily available materials, bodily gestures, vernacular forms and collaborative and care-full practices. Aimed at revealing and reconfiguring the limitations and violence of existing social structures and systems, the exhibition re-imagines relations within those systems, resisting their extractivist logic. The dialogue between the artists explores and reinvents the field of art both as a place of refuge and as a space for new alliances.
The exhibition Artistic Ecologies Every Day is the first event within the project Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances which WHW recently initiated in collaboration with the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam and Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit.
Projection of the videos Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done by Vlatka Horvat and Future by Marina Naprushkina is supported by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre.
Marina Naprushkina will hold a workshop at Živi atelje with Women to Women Collective on September 8th.
BIOS:
Vlatka Horvat is an artist working across a wide range of forms and media, 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. Horvat’s work has been shown internationally in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, performance venues and festivals and in public space – and is held in many public and private collections. Born in Croatia, she moved to the US as a teenager and spent twenty years there. She currently lives in London, and teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts London. www.vlatkahorvat.com
Marina Naprushkina is an artist, feminist and activist. Her diverse artistic practice includes video, performance, drawings, installation, and text. Naprushkina is mostly working outside of institutional spaces, in cooperation with communities and activist organizations. Naprushkina is focusing on creating new formats, structures, and organizations based on self-organization overlap in theory and practice. In 2007 Naprushkina founded the Office for Anti Propaganda, which concentrates on power structures in nation-states. In 2013 Naprushkina started the initiative Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit, which grew to be one of the largest initiatives in Berlin and built up a strong community of people with and without migrant and refugee backgrounds. Naprushkina was awarded the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture (2017) and the Sussmann Artist Award (2015). She participated a.o. at the Kyiv Biennale (2017), the 7th Berlin Biennale (2011), 11th International Istanbul Biennale (2009). Naprushkina teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
The program is supported by:
European Commission’s Creative Europe program
City Office for Culture, International Relations and Civil Society
Croatian Audiovisual Centre
Foundation for Arts Initiatives
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
Kultura Nova Foundation
Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation