Table Animals

Table Animals, a collaborative durational performance by Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells, unfolds through a continuous process of call and response between the two artists as they face each other across a table. Taking turns to arrange and rearrange a set of wooden and plastic toy animals in the bordered expanse of the table top, the two artists engage in a shifting game that moves between making patterns, narratives, formal arrangements and pictures from their chosen materials. A playful and competitive trading back and forth of elements within a pre-arranged performative frame, Table Animals is also a kind of silent tabletop theatre in which the surface of the table becomes a slowly changing stage. First presented as part of Horvat and Etchells’ durational project Over the Table at Aichi Trieniale 2010, Nagoya, Japan - a five-day performance-installation structured as a series of exchanges across a table. The two artists occupy the gallery space together for the duration of the piece, engaging in a playful and competitive trading back and forth of elements within a set of pre-arranged performative frames. A series of simple tables are arranged in the gallery space. Each of these tables is set up with particular materials or tools for specific performance activities and tasks to be undertaken by the two artists over the course of each day. Exploring the table as a ubiquitous plane of action and production, communication and exchange (a site of discussions and problem solving, a site of sharing – of solutions, ideas, games), the project approaches the space ‘over the table’ as a series of mini stages at which particular activities and collaborations take place – some more concrete in their relation to acts of production; others more oblique, or “un-productive,” or contemplative, or gestural. Visitors to the gallery may arrive, stay, depart, and return throughout opening hours and always encounter the artists performing one or another of our tasks and performances. Moving from speech to silent activity, from formal concentration to everyday casualness, from conversation to playful confrontation, Etchells and Horvat map and make use of the different spaces and possibilities in their creative and personal exchange, while exploring ideas of dialogue and relation, of give and take, exploiting the contradictions and tensions that arise from muddling the clear-cut distinction between private and public activity, and private and public space. Meanwhile, evidence of the varied activities gradually fills the space of the gallery over the course of five days, accumulating alongside whatever is currently happening – the walls filling with collages and works on paper, the video projectors showing looped material recorded on previous days, and so on – creating as well a record of time past, time shared in the space – always offered in a dialogue with the here-and-now, with the current activity unfolding in front of a live audience

Not Standing in Place

Not Standing in Place is a collaborative project by Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells, for which the two invited a group of international artists to create imaginary monuments in text form to be installed on the Landiwiese in Zurich, home for the city’s Theater Spektakel festival. These temporary monuments summoned in language are manifested as various text-bearing structures, from billboards and 3-dimensional constructions to small signs and banners. From monuments focusing on personal stories or interests; forgotten or marginalized histories; surprising events or images; shared dreams or even abstract ideas, Not Standing in Place presents a highly playful and deeply serious reimagining of what we might choose to memorialize or draw attention to in shared public space; which aspects of experience, history and daily life are marked or celebrated, how and by whom. In different ways, the 14 diverse text-based works created within the frame of the project open up a playful and vivid space of public imagination, reflection and thinking, bringing to the fore questions around permanence/ephemeralness, around material presence, and more broadly around societal change. -- With newly commissioned works by: Anne Bean, Caroline Bergvall, Season Butler, Tania El Khoury, Sharon Hayes, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, David Horvitz, Peter Liversidge, Harun Morrison, Ahmet Öğüt, Katrina Palmer, Dan Perjovschi, Dread Scott, and Schwar zenbach Kompl ex

Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown

Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown, edited by Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells, is a collection of stories, flash fiction, poems, autofiction and conceptual writing gathered during the April and May Covid-19 lockdown, bringing together UK-based writers, poets, performance makers and artists. Published in a PDF format by Unstable Object, a publishing project run by Etchells and Horvat, the book is available to buy on a pay-what-you-choose basis, with 100% of proceeds to be donated to the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity. The writing in Seen from Here is extremely diverse – spanning enigmatic fiction, poetry, powerful autofiction, prescient language artworks and compelling performance texts. While some of the work reflects directly or indirectly on the lockdown experience and the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, other pieces offer glimpses of past events, other realities and fictional landscapes. All but one of the texts included in the collection are previously unpublished and most are newly written, emerging from the isolating state of the lockdown to form a hallucinatory portrait of the concerns, intimate realities and fragile fantasies of the UK in the pandemic zone of 2020

Thinking Back to What You Said

Thinking Back to What You Said is a collaborative lecture by Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells, part of the series of public events 'Evenings with WHW Akademija.' In 'Thinking Back to What You Said' the two artists deliver a series of reflections on their own practice and that of other artists. The evening-length presentation involves the two artists speaking about their own and about each other’s projects, as well as about select works by other artists that continue to inspire or inform their own work. 'Thinking Back to What You Said' is at once an artistic exchange and an improvised essay, an attempt to speak about art practice in a form born out of it. It’s also a glimpse of the ongoing conversation between Etchells and Horvat, whose occasional collaborations on exhibitions, publications, and other kinds of projects are buttressed by a longstanding and continually evolving shared discourse about processes, art works and their relation to viewers. - 'Evenings with WHW Akademija' is a series of public events of WHW Akademija, an experimental postgraduate school based in Zagreb, realized in partnership with the Kontakt Collection, Vienna. The event series is supported by: European Commission’s Creative Europe program, European Cultural Foundation, Kontakt Collection / ERSTE Foundation, Foundation for Arts Initiatives, City Office for Culture, International Relations and Civil Society, Kultura Nova Foundation, Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croati

Dialogue 2009

Dialogue 2009 was co-authored with Prof Tim Etchells, this 16 page work included two new illustrations by Penny McCarthy. The exchange was a discussion of the multiple meanings that can be extrapolated from forms of plagiarism and copying in both specific contemporary and historical contexts. The project is published on line: www.transmission.uk.com Dialogue 2009 was presented as a paper at Transmission: HOSPITALITY, held in July 2010, and included in Transmission: Annual, the journal launched at the conference.</p