Which Stops You Going Further

Vlatka Horvat

kollectiv, Folkestone, 11th-27th September 2026






 Where does one thing finish and another start? In Vlatka Horvat’s Which Stops You Going Further, edges are folded, wrapped, covered, extended, joined together and pulled apart. At the margins of images and pieces of cloth, at the sides of furniture and in the corners of the gallery, this constellation of works reminds the viewer that edges, contours and borders can be as arbitrary as they can profound. Sometimes they keep things safely in. Equally, at others, they stop them from getting out.  





“on edge, cutting edge, pushed to the margins, driven to the brink”






Horvat has long been interested in such contradictions. Her works frequently begin with ordinary things and simple operations performed upon them: cutting, folding, wrapping, joining, balancing. These gestures are modest, sometimes almost absurdly so. Yet they have consequences.




The exhibition title is lifted — then spliced — from the dictionary definition of an edge, something ‘which stops you going further’. Enacting her process of reconstituting fragments of familiar objects, this matter-of-fact description begins to sound poetic, psychological. What is an edge? A physical limit, certainly, but also something we encounter, negotiate, test and occasionally cross. We can be on edge, cutting edge, pushed to the margins, driven to the brink. An edge divides one thing from another, but it is also precisely where the two meet.



In In Relation to a Fault I–V (2014), fragments cut from images of the ground are paired according to the shapes of their remaining edges, echoing geological fault lines. What was once peripheral becomes central, two unrelated pieces seeming to search for a way of fitting together, although they never quite do. As such, viewers must imagine a ‘perfect’ repair, or learn to live with the apparent fault — definitive in its own way. Elsewhere, edges acquire material weight. The soft felt structures of Wave Form I and II (2023) keep their shape because their ends are allowed to collapse. In Perimeter I–III (2023), pieces of fabric are wrapped around the margins of small textile rectangles, partly protecting them and partly obscuring them. The added borders do not quite behave themselves: some fall short; others extend beyond the territory they are supposed to contain. Overhang Table (2018) performs a related operation on a familiar domestic object. Felt laid across its surface slips over its sides, apparently dragging the table’s hard edges downwards and turning a fixed boundary into something pliable and precarious. 




This uncertainty becomes physical in the new works made for Folkestone. In Raised Contraption II, two plant restraints bound together by twine balance on grooved concrete blocks reminiscent of molars, supporter becoming supportee. Raised Contraption I (2026) repurposes a galvanised steel ring for a tree, meant to create a neat border and protect its roots. Only here, the spikes point upwards like the rays of a crown or the jaws of a bear trap. Sun Trap (2026) – a similarly circular work, though made for the wall rather than the floor – picks up this metaphor and makes it altogether lighter, from punning title to textile fringe. Both sculptures could be seen as topographical cordons, denoting nothing but empty space.  





“pliable and precarious”




    


 While Raised Contraption I and II both employ hard materials associated with the outdoors – gardens and parks – Holding Back (2026) evokes a living room. Two modified chair backs lean together, each supporting the other at an angle neither could maintain alone. There is tenderness in this, but also unease. The backs of chairs carry an obvious memory of bodies, even when those bodies are absent. To support something is to hold it up; to hold something can also mean to restrain it – were two viewers to take residence in the chairs, they’d be trapped in mutually assured toppling. Horvat’s altered furniture is at once familiar and unusable, caught somewhere between an invitation to sit and a threat of what would happen if you did.


Corners, too, refuse to stay put. In Unfolding Corner (2026), sheets of paper are cut and folded outwards, sprawling into the gallery as if some colourful, geometric mould was gaining territory. The bounded space of the page expands beyond itself while the corner appears to open, multiply and unfold. Inside becomes outside, and surface becomes volume. 




These are small interventions, but their implications travel. Borders determine bodies and territories as much as objects. They tell us what belongs where, what is inside and what is outside, who or what may pass and what must remain contained. Yet Horvat’s edges are rarely secure. They bulge, collapse, overlap, fail to meet, or acquire another edge around themselves. The more emphatically a boundary is drawn, the more its contingency becomes apparent.

In Folkestone, that thought has a particular resonance. This is itself an edge: a town facing the narrow stretch of water that separates Britain from continental Europe. Seen from here, the coastline can appear as a definitive boundary. Look for longer and it becomes something else: the place where two territories — land and sea — continually meet. Perhaps that is the proposition running through Which Stops You Going Further. An edge is not simply the place where something stops. It is also where something else begins.



Which Stops You Going Further is the third in Juha, a series of four exhibitions by Central European artists which continues at kollectiv through to February 2027. 


Curated by Sammi Gale

Design by Purdy