With Vlatka Horvat. 2006. In the frame of Protections at Kunsthaus Graz.

Participating artists: Guy Ben-Ner, Kristina Horvat Blazinovic, Johannes Atli Hinriksson, Lucky Pierre, Howard Matthew, Brad McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Oliver Michaels, Kate McIntosh, Adrian Paci, Graham Parker, Paulette Phillips, Sean Reynard, Aîda Ruilova, Anna Witt.

Nothing Good House was a project by Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, located in one of three temporary houses constructed in Kunsthaus Graz. Over a period of four weeks, it was used as a site for an unfolding presentation of works in installation, performance, text, and video.

Through works by Etchells, Horvat and invited artists, Nothing Good House brought into play a reverse perspective of the domestic’s most commonplace positives - the house as welcoming shelter, a safe or protected space. In place of these comforting banalities, Nothing Good House created an environment that subtly invoked and explored ideas of unease and uncertainty, stasis, threat and anxiety - using an economy of means and a certain matter-of fact attitude.

Etchells and Horvat - both artists with diverse individual practices - occasionally collaborate on projects as a way to explore shared interests and concerns. Their works together have included curatorial initiatives, as well as video, performance and publication. In different ways, both artists’ practices tackle discomforting or uncertain aspects of lived experience and invite viewers into encounters with works that are in equal measure blank, obsessive, comical, and disconcerting. Both artists have been preoccupied with strategies and conditions often deemed negative – fragments, failures, denials and contradictions, the breakdown of systems, the inadequacies of language and representation.

Nothing Good House was a continuation of these investigations. Horvat and Etchells’ collaborative works - created especially for the house - included a faxing project titled To Bring Down a House for which the two sent drawings, collages, and diagrams to a fax machine in the house over the course of the month, proposing many different ways to attack or destroy a house; and a performative sign painting work Rotten Days that has a member of the museum staff painting a new sign daily on one of the walls in the house. In addition, the two curated a program of video, projected in a compilation in one of the rooms. This program included works by Guy Ben-Ner, Johannes Atli Hinriksson, Howard Matthew, Brad McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Oliver Michaels, Kate McIntosh, Adrian Paci, Graham Parker, Sean Reynard, and Anna Witt. Video loops by Horvat, Paulette Phillips and Aîda Ruilova were also presented on monitors in different parts of the house. Other projects for Nothing Good House included a neon, collages and a series of photographs by Horvat, an interactive modified telephone, an LED board, and a sound announcement for a PA system by Etchells, a set of window curtains by Kristina Horvat Blazinovic, and an unfolding installation titled Final Meals by the Chicago collective Lucky Pierre.

Frequently pursuing events or processes that unfold in real time, these diverse works eschewed completed narrative in favour of fragments and images that subverted or questioned the viewer’s assumptions of the larger context. Nothing Good House turned the four-roomed domestic structure into a troubled index of its own negatives – an unprotected, unheimliche location – presenting skewed perspectives on the physical space and its uses, and offering doubt and subtle disquiet in place of shelter.