97 & 99 Hoxton Street
4 February - 2 April
PEER presents an exhibition of ambitious new work by Vlatka Horvat (b. 1974, Croatia). Across different forms and media, Horvat investigates the precarious relationships between bodies, objects, the built environment, and nature by redrawing and reimaging the physical, social, and environmental boundaries experienced in our everyday lives.
Central to the exhibition at PEER is an epic series titled To See Stars over Mountains (2021), consisting of 365 works on paper – one produced for every day of 2021. Each work in the series starts with a photograph the artist has taken on her daily excursions, which she then playfully and radically reimagines through different interventions – cutting or tearing the paper, collaging, and drawing onto the image. The resulting works morph aspects of the landscape, transforming mundane everyday scenes into exciting new utopias, or disturbing dystopias – all offering new, boundless possibilities.
Alongside works on paper, Horvat presents a site-responsive sculptural installation made using simple found and commonplace materials, the work pushes and probes at the edges of the built environment encompassing it, challenging its confines. By creating physical barriers or intrusions into the architecture, Horvat directly addresses the possibilities and problems of inhabiting and negotiating space, and the effects that this can have on social structures and encounters with people and place.
The exhibition also includes Horvat’s recent video work, titled Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done (2021). The 24-minute film follows a handful of lone figures as they travel through the deserted landscape, pushing, rolling, and dragging a series of miscellaneous objects in a playful yet apparently purposeless labour. The film reflects on the relationship between humans, objects, and nature: on our overwhelming desire to control and manipulate the world around us and the undeniable reality that our future and our destination are both unknown and out of reach.
97 & 99 Hoxton Street, N1 6QL
