Echo Location is the first presentation of Vlatka Horvat’s work in Bulgaria. The exhibition uses minimal sculptural intervention, text, and video to subvert and reimagine the space of the Swimming Pool 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 outside terrace and the rooftop pool that gives the gallery its name, Horvat creates a second installation extending her impulse to mischievous spatial doubling. Deep End uses found mirrors of different shapes, sizes and provenance, arranged at the bottom of the empty pool, creating a 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.
The exhibition opened the third edition of Nine Elephants, a summer festival for art in the urban environment, which took place across Sofia and its peripheries from July 9 to 19, 2026. This year’s edition, titled Everything We Do, brought together more than 20 artistic projects that explored the city through everyday actions, work, care, learning, and the many visible and invisible interactions that shape urban life.
