by the means at hand

Engaging with the theme of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition for the Venice Biennale, 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.

For the exhibition, Horvat 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, with the help of various friends, acquaintances and even strangers travelling to Venice, 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 to deliver letters, parcels, documents, money, and other material goods to family members and others who live 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.”

Photo: Hugo Glendinning (or Gesa Lemaitre or Vlatka Horvat)
Courtesy Vlatka Horvat: By the Means at Hand – Croatian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale

^{a streth of land}

2023
Graphite on cotton paper, handmade paper from Inula Viscosa, Nettles, natural fiber and found objects Mixed media on paper
Dimensions variable
Commissioned by Beirut Art Center


Pharmakon is a Greek word that describes a polarity inherently present in pharmacological substances. It comes from the idea that a poisonous ingredient can just as easily transform into a medicinal one and vice-versa. This polarity is not physically visible. The work gives visual form to pharmakon present in exchanges with my surroundings.

On my foraging trips, Inula “طيــون” (pronounced as Tayyoun) is a dominant plant in most sites. It is a shrub that is also known as the wound herb due to its healing characteristics. It ’’عشــبة الجــرح“ flourishes best in areas where the soil is heavily degraded. I’ve encountered Inula on the side of the newly excavated road near my parents’ house. I see it in empty parking lots in the city, on the sidewalks next to my studio, and in the various unused plots in Downtown Beirut. The healing conditions of this shrub are juxtaposed with its propensity and inclination to grow in depleted environments.

A Stretch of Land is a visual investigation of the different forms of pharmakon present in my daily surroundings. It traces the materiality of the conditions provided for things to grow, particularly ones which offer us nourishment in return.

The work will be accompanied with regular foraging walks around Jisr el Wati area and a presentation on different forms of Pharmakon.

migrating seeds

Part of the Dancing on the Edge (DOTE) Festival, which included various discussion sessions with cultural practitioners in Amsterdam, Beirut, and Palermo. The outcome was a series of events held in these three cities. The Beirut team featured Nour Oseeiran from Temporary Art Platform (TAP) and Christian Sleiman.

The final event in Beirut included a foraging walk guided by Chady Rizk and a culinary presentation led by Hiba Najem, Heather Kaeyd, and Chri stian Sleiman.

“The understanding of a community garden resonates in Beirut through the act of foraging: we find similarities in principles and practice when taking care of plants that end up belonging to a bigger community than ourselves. This is where the act of foraging comes in to replace the need to physically plant a space and, instead, offers the city as a community-garden that has been planted through deliberate and accidental human and natural actions. The remnants of green spaces that defy the concrete jungle in Beirut, tie together to provide a number of edible shrubs for the city’s inhabitants.

In the near impossibility to plant a garden in Beirut and tackling the questions around community and public, we want to focus on the possibility of a garden that exists in expanded time and space. In navigating notions of migration and displacement, we are asking our collaborators (Aterraterra, Reza Merabi, Maureen de Jong, Anastasis Sarakatsanos and Natascha Hagenbeek) as well as four cultural practitioners based in Beirut to share which seeds they would like to contribute to our community garden, the seeds that they would like to save for the end of the world, and a recipe that would carry their story alongside it. Our virtual community garden acts like a seedbank, existing through the narratives of those who are contributing to it.”
Text by Nour Osseiran

you can't discourse without disco

Final week of WHW Akademija, October 2022
Galerija Nova, Teslina 7

Darko Aleksovski, Željko Beljan, diana cantarey, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Maksym Khodak, Nadežda Kirćanski, Stela Mikulin, Ruoru Mou, Kristina Pashkova, Christian Sleiman, Bojan Stojčić, Huda Takriti

Beginning in March 2022, the 4th edition of WHW Akademija has evolved as a process of collaborative and reciprocal learning, facilitated by a group of invited professors but also by the twelve selected participants, whose individual commitments have unfolded over time into an investigation of collectivity and the common. The final week in Galerija Nova is both a presentation and continuation of this process, an exhibitionary habitat for themes, questions, joys and anxieties that have accumulated through a host of online and onsite workshops, lectures, seminars, meetings, chat groups, collectively edited documents, excel sheets and mind maps. Conceived and organized by participants themselves, with the mentoring support of this year’s resident professor independent scholar and writer Ivana Bago, this final event is structured as a “base for artistic research,” or simply, a bar, which will serve as an anchor point for a series of public events happening daily from 5 to 8 pm and constituting an exhibition-in-progress.

All the links related to the 4th Edition of WHW akademija
WHW Akademija 2022: Artistic Ecologies
WHW Akademija 2022 Zagreb Summer School

Adrijana Gvozdenović, Ruoru Mou and Huda Takriti in WHW Akademija conversations
Diana Cantarey, Maksym Khodak and Kristina Pashkova in WHW Akademija conversations
Stela Mikulin, Christian Sleiman and Bojan Stojčić in WHW Akademija conversations
Darko Aleksovski, Željko Beljan and Nadežda Kirćanski in WHW Akademija conversations

Final Week of WHW Akademija 2022YOU CAN’T DISCOURSE WITHOUT DISCO

Monsters arrived again but this time things felt different

a seasonal ritual

^{The work was developed through Art Evolution program by Goethe-Institut supported by German Federal Foreign Office
Different installaments of the work were exhibited or performed in:
◍ Galerie Tanit, “Togetherness” collective exhibition, June-Aug 2021
◍ Temporary Art Platform (TAP), “art, ecology and the commons”, Aug-Sept 2021
◍ Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Aug 2021
◍ Goethe-Institut Schwäbisch Hall, “Encounters”, Nov 2021
◍ FoodCulture days biennale, May 2023}

Inspired by the local communities in rural areas in Lebanon,“a seasonal ritual” is an invitation to forage, cook and serve each other. The work weaves a collection of recipes and experiments around the culture of utilizing shrubs and serving food.

At the heart of foraging is a seasonal understanding of the natural world. Humans would follow what the land has to offer; a coevolution that takes place through human activities. The gatherers would identify where the shrubs would grow and around what time of the season. Foraging represents a form of a multi-species understanding where the locals would take what they need and leave some for the shrub to regenerate next year.

Although It’s an individual activity, it is performed collectively. We’ve been carrying those rituals from year to year and from one body to another. the food we serve, the body we nourish and the table we're gathered around becomes a vessel of generational knowledge. “a seasonal ritual” will nurture a conversation around our agencies in a city where it left us deprived from all primary resources through the poetic dimensions of cooking and eating together.

presentation at hammana artist house

Culinary presentation during Renouer avec le vivant organized by L’ATELLINE


Performance during “Encounters” organized organized by Goethe-Institut Schwäbisch Hall