Miha Horvat: She Named Them Poetical Archives S26 E3, 2000–2025
23 – 30 / 10 / 2025
OPENING: Thursday, October 23rd at 20:00
The exhibition is open to visitors from Monday to Thursday during the gallery’s working hours from 17:00 to 20:00
Club Kocka Gallery, Youth Center Split, Slobode St. 28, Split, Croatia
In 2015, I presented my series—a collection, an archive—to Aphra Tesla, and her response was: “These are poetical archives, Miha.”
Curatorial School 2025
As part of this exhibition Curatorial School 2025 will be held from October 27 to 30, 2025 at Club Kocka Gallery (Youth Centre, Split), in collaboration with the Transnational Guerrilla Art School (TGAS).
Participation is free of charge, and applications are open until October 26, 2025 via mavena@mavena.hr
ABOUT THE WORK
In this solo exhibition, Slovenian transmedia artist Miha Horvat presents a series he calls Poetical Archives.
A poetical archive is a continually expanding collection that preserves institutions, objects, intimate and found materials, as well as artworks. The artistic task is situated in the cohabitation of the personal with the impersonal, the marginal with the sublime, the open with the closed. In hermetically sealed transparent plexiglass boxes, Horvat archives and compresses collections, compositions, and social commentaries; the contents range from artistic concepts to down-to-earth items such as spent toilet-paper rolls, beer bottles, or shattered tennis balls.
It is a series of life archive boxes — called the Poetical Archive.
The archive has also emerged through the participation of many of Horvat’s peers and collaborators across intermedia art, design, architecture, digital production, and sound.
The Split exhibition for the first time presents two new archives.
FOREWORD
When Miha Horvat presented his series of archival boxes in 2015, poet and intermedia artist Aphra Tesla named them Poetic Archives. In this act of naming already lies the key to reading this work: an archive that is simultaneously a document and a poem, a collection and a composition. Since 2000, Horvat has been building this series as an ever-growing collection in which traces of institutions, everyday objects, artworks, and intimate fragments are gathered.
The Poetic Archives are not closed entities but processual capsules that emerge in the cohabitation of the personal and impersonal, the trivial and the sublime, the open and the enclosed. Within them, collections and social commentaries are archived and compressed (from artistic concepts to used toilet paper rolls, beer bottles, or broken tennis balls). In this sense, the archive ceases to be a mere repository and becomes a field where any material can be transformed into a sign.
The transparent plexiglass boxes are not neutral containers. They always create a barrier: their contents are visible, yet never directly accessible. Every gaze passes through a layer of optical distortion, reflection, and deformation. The objects within are never merely objects, but their images, representations shaped by a filter that separates them from the viewer.
This opens a crucial question: what matters more, what is shown or how it is shown? In this regard, Horvat’s archives continue a line that begins with Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, where the question of the image overcame the question of representation. If Malevich’s square is an icon of emptiness, Horvat’s box is an icon of oversaturation (fragments of reality compressed into a sealed capsule).
The artistic genealogies of Horvat’s archives can be traced through the works of Arman and Joseph Cornell: the former created transparent compressions of objects as a critique of consumer culture, while Cornell’s boxes were intimate microcosms of personal imagination. Horvat, however, differs in that he builds his archives as processual structures that unite the individual and the collective, the artistic and the everyday. His boxes are not confined within a static aesthetic composition but evolve as open, expanding, and collaborative entities (often created in participation with other artists, designers, architects, and digital or sound authors).
On a theoretical level, the Poetic Archives inscribe themselves within the field of concepts opened by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Hal Foster. Derrida connects them with the archival “fever” (the desire to record and preserve everything, even though what is essential always escapes). Foucault’s understanding of the archive as a system of statements is here expanded to the trivial and the discarded, erasing hierarchies of value. Hal Foster’s reading of archival art as a reconstruction of lost narratives takes on a new form in Horvat’s work: the archive is not reconstruction but compression and also a collection that produces new possibilities of reading. And Marcel Duchamp’s thesis on the idea and concept as the core of art is reaffirmed in every one of Horvat’s archives.
But above all, each box is a poem. Its rhythm arises from repetition, from emptiness, from the accidental encounters of materials. The viewer stands before them as before a musical score (free to interpret, yet always at a distance, aware that what is seen remains just beyond reach).
The exhibition in Split presents two new archives, two new capsules that expand this decades-long series and confirm that the Poetic Archives are not closed to the past but constantly open new spaces of interpretation. Rather than making the archive a site of order and classification, Horvat transforms it into a field of oversaturation, opacity, and openness. His Poetic Archives function as both artistic and social experiment (an attempt to preserve the traces of reality while simultaneously opening possibilities for new readings and meanings).
ABOUT THE AUTOR
Miha Horvat (born 1976) is a PhD student in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana) and holds a Master’s degree in New Media Arts (University of Applied Arts, Vienna – die Angewandte). He lives and works in Maribor. He is the legal representative of the Sonda Foundation and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory GT22. He is the founder of the EX-garage gallery project and a member of the Transnational Guerrilla Art School. His artistic practice spans techniques that combine various products of technological development, performance art, theatre space, light and media sculpture, as well as spatial and conceptual interventions. He has developed his work through numerous organizations and platforms, including Klon.Art, son:DA, sonda 3, MFRU Festival, KIBLIX Festival, and in collaboration with Ivica Buljan, Bojan Jablanovec, Beton LTD, and danceCO. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions.
QUOTES
“The artistic task of Miha Horvat’s activity lives on the edges of the personal with the impersonal, the marginal with the freely sublime. Personal history placed on the periphery of everyday life resonates in the phenomenon of a syncretic poetic whole that anyone can read.” — Aphra Tesla, 2019.
“With a series of documents/archives, Miha Horvat represents Duchamp’s thesis that art is a matter of idea and concept and by no means a mere mimetic copying of the world. Art must shock; if not, it fails to achieve its purpose.” — Petra Čeh, 2020.
“One compression. One collection. Multiple compositions. Document as archive. Archive as document.” — Miha Horvat, 2021.
IMPRESSUM
CURATOR / Natasha Kadin
NMG CURATORIAL TEAM / Karla Čudina, Natasha Kadin, Vedran Perkov
FOREWORD AUTHOR / Jelena Šimundić Bendić
TRANSLATION / Katarina Duplančić Dugopoljac
DOCUMENTATION / Vanessa Barač
SETUP / Miha Horvat, Natasha Kadin, Aphra Tesla
DONORS / Ministarstvo kulture i medija RH, Grad Split
MAVENA SUPPORTED BY / Zaklada Kultura nova
SPECIAL MENTION / KUM, MKC, PDM
DESIGN / Mladen Luketić
PRINT / Kopiring