Artistic Ecologies: Every Day

Artistic Ecologies Every Day, curated by Ana Devic, 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. Vlatka 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 also includes Horvat’s new works in sculpture (Into and Out of), drawing (a to b etc; To Still the Eye), and collage (One Thing on Top of Another), as well as 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. Both artists delivered artist talks before the exhibition opening on 9 September 2022. The exhibition Artistic Ecologies Every Day is the first event within the project Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances - a collaboration between WHW (Zagreb and Vienna), the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam), and Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit (Berlin). The presentation of video works - Horvat's Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done by Vlatka Horvat and Naprushkina's Future - is supported by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre. The exhibition is supported by: European Commission’s Creative Europe programme; City of Zagreb Office for Culture, International Relations and Civil Society; Croatian Audiovisual Centre; Foundation for Arts Initiatives; The Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia; Kultura Nova Foundation; Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundatio