Croatian Pavilion at 2024 Venice Biennale

 Engaging with the theme of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition for La Biennale di Venezia, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion, curated by Antonia Majaca, exists as an accumulative exhibition of artworks by a wide-ranging group of international artists living “as foreigners,” reflecting on questions and urgencies of the diasporic experience. The exhibition is generated through a social and performative exchange taking place over the course of the Biennale Arte 2024. Vlatka is inviting artists living in diaspora all over the world to engage in a series of reciprocal exchanges of artworks and other materials, all of which are sent between Venice and other places by improvised means – via various friends, travelers, and strangers who are enlisted as informal couriers for the project. The title of the project – By the Means at Hand – refers to the improvised transport systems whereby individuals activate informal networks of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to deliver letters, parcels, documents, money, and other material goods to family members and others who live in cities or countries far away. While such practices are born out of social dispersal, migration, and displacement, the networks they give rise to build effectively on wider principles of solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, and friendship – factors that the project emphasizes as prerequisites for co-existing with others, and as key elements in the toolkit for those living “in foreign lands.”