Before What Came After

Through an improvised performance, a shared perspective on the past, present and future emerges – along with the possibilities for everyday resistance.

In “Before What Came After”, the artist Vlatka Horvat brings together a group of international female artists for an improvised durational performance centred on the exchange of photographs from the participants’ personal archives.

Horvat’s international guests, who are based in Berlin, have all experienced some form of upheaval, turmoil or instability. Together, they reflect on how people endure, cope with and overcome processes of social change. Drawing on their images—which depict everyday objects, scenes and places—the participating artists draw upon their diverse yet interconnected narratives of migration and experiences in the diaspora to reflect collectively on the intertwining of past, present and future.

“Before What Came After” regards the artists’ image archives and the stories they contain as indices of social change, and uses personal narratives, observations and speculations to look beyond loss, destruction and erasure towards forms and possibilities of everyday resistance.

(ENGLISH)