DAVID HORVITZ
Born in 1974
David Horvitz’s artistic actions exploit the specificity of different means of communication, information channels and relational contexts, highlighting their inherent contradictions and unprecedented potential. Presented across a variety of media, from mail art to performance, from photography to installation to incursions on the web, his works are based on the idea of movement, distance and migration. Horvitz’s aim is to connect different spheres: the virtual and the real, the private and the public, the near and the distant, the past and the future, the subject and the other. Space and time expand in multiple dimensions, showing the mesh of their relativity, rebelling against standardized measurement systems to reveal new possibilities of experience. For the 58th October Salon, Horvitz communicates with the architecture and urban planning of the city of Belgrade, presenting Give Us Back Our Stars (2020-2021), a flag with the colors of the night, showing a constellation of hundreds of asterisks. The work is a re-appropriation of an older work of Horvitz’s that addresses the destruction of the night sky by light pollution (with light on all the time, where is there room to dream?). In this new form, the flag takes on a new meaning. Sewn by hand in Kosovo by Shkurte Halilaj, the mother of Petrit Halilaj, the work is a gesture of solidarity and friendship with the artist—who renounced to take part in the exhibition—and his country of origin. Horvitz, working from the United States, a country that recognizes Kosovo’s independence, is exhibiting the work in a country that does not recognize it. For the Biennale, the artist’s iconic book How to Shoplift Books, a guide to 80 ways in which one can steal a book, is being published for the first time in Serbian. The book, which can be read in The Dreamers Library, enriches the editorial section of the exhibition.