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