“Your spatial parts are things like your head, your feet and your nose; your temporal parts are things like you-yesterday, you-today and you-tomorrow. If you have different temporal parts, this would explain how you can exist at different times, and it would also explain how you can have different properties at different times…Persisting through time is pretty much like extending through space; itʼs all a matter of parts.” (Katherine Hawley, Temporal Parts)

The work of Vlatka Horvat presents the inherent disjuncture between the corporeal sensation of bodily presence (the feeling that “I am here, now”) with the dislocated presence that is conveyed through historical and archival photography. In the series of collages entitled With the Sky on Their Shoulders, Horvat accesses an archive of her own family photographs to produce a critical re-reading of her historical past, that of socialist Yugoslavia. Through cutting, excision and re-configuring these images in what appears to be a rather violent act, Horvat expresses an internal frustration at the personal detachment that she and many others feel when they look at images of a period that she cannot access with her physical body.

Continuing Katherine Hawleyʼs distinction between spatial and temporal parts as they relate to oneʼs sense of corporeality, the neon work On Rising and Falling Ground (II) is positioned within the installation as a representation of this dislocation between past and present. The illuminated and exaggerated form of the neon sculpture is concurrent with Horvatʼs violent excision of individual faces and body parts within the field of her collages.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)