The third edition of the Nine Elephants Festival opens on July 9th, 2026 with Echo Location, a solo show by Vlatka Horvat at Swimming Pool.
Echo Location is a solo show by London-based artist Vlatka Hovat – the first presentation of her work in Bulgaria – which uses minimal sculptural intervention, text, and video to subvert and reimagine the space of the Swimming Pool gallery and the city in which it sits.
In the installation Room/Rooms, placed in the central space of the gallery, ordinary construction materials are combined into a low half-wall that echoes the shapes of the walls, doors and the architectural plan of the space itself. It simultaneously divides, reflects and questions the space, playfully complicating its use and prompting visitors to follow unexpected routes through it.
For the outdoor terrace and the rooftop pool that gives the space its name, Horvat creates a second installation that continues her characteristic interest in doubling spaces. Deep End uses found mirrors of different shapes, sizes and origins, arranged at the bottom of the empty pool and propped at various angles along its walls. They create a geometric and fragmented reimagining of the absent water surface and its reflections, while simultaneously returning viewers to their own images, broken into fragments among reflections of the sky.
Back in the gallery, Ten Scores is a new series of text-based works built on instructions, functioning as interactive “scores” that shift the focus onto the viewers themselves and their gazes, bodies and relationships with the architectural and urban space in which they encounter the work.
The exhibition concludes with Horvat’s 2021 video work Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done — a hallucinatory performative film in which five performers move through the landscape near Horvat’s home in London, pushing, rolling, dragging or otherwise manipulating a chaotic collection of found objects — large and small — in a series of movements and wanderings without a clearly defined purpose or end.
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Within the framework of the project, a workshop led by Vlatka Horvat will take place on July 8. If you would like to register, please email us, as places are limited.
On the opening day, July 9, we invite you to a preview of the exhibition and a conversation with the artist, taking place from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM.
From 6:00 PM you are warmly invited to the official opening of the exhibition and the Nine Elephants Festival.
Vlatka Horvat is an artist working across a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, collage and photography, as well as performance, video, writing and publishing. Her selected exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Kunsthalle Wien, PUBLICS (Helsinki), MARTa Herford, Bergen Kunsthall, MoMA PS1, and The Kitchen (New York), as well as participation in the first Aichi Triennale (Nagoya), the 11th Istanbul Biennial and the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. Her performances have been shown in institutions across Europe, North America and other parts of the world. In 2024, she represented Croatia at the 60th Venice Biennale. Born in Croatia when the country was still part of Yugoslavia, Horvat moved to the United States as a teenager, where she lived for twenty years. She currently lives and works in London.
