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

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

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

Rotten Days

Rotten Days is a performative work based around a selection of provocative, often ill-humoured texts by artists Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells, painted daily on a wall of the exhibition space. Each text is displayed for only one day before being painted over and replaced with a new one – the change orchestrated through a simple daily action/performance carried out by a member of staff of the institution presenting the work, according to the artists’ schedule. The work – new statements and the accumulating traces of previous ones layered in a single designated area on the gallery wall – emphasizes the provisional nature of the ideas it proposes in language, drawing viewers into a direct relation with its slogans and messages, in equal measure blank, disconcerting, comical and playfully confrontational. The images shown are from the Rotterdam version of the project, where the work was presented in the context of "The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part of Something Else" at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2014