Klara Hobza: Early Endeavors

Klara Hobza creates long-term art projects that often test the limits of possibility. Yet the German-Czech artist always tackles the apparent lack of a solution to the problems she has set herself with a strong will, planning and implementing her schemes step by step and shunning neither danger nor confrontation. Setbacks are no less part of her work than successes, which she documents in writings, photographs, drawings, objects, or films. The publication “Early Endeavors” vividly illustrates the tenacity and obsessiveness with which Klara Hobza pursues her ideas, be it the several years she spent trying to establish contact with the residents of New York using Morse signals or the repatriation of sixty starlings that were brought to the US from England in the nineteenth century. Launched in 2010, her most recent project, titled Diving through Europe, would seem a gigantic undertaking: the artist plans to cross Europe―underwater. Leg by leg, she dives through the rivers connecting the North Sea to the Black Sea. A positively boundless endeavor, whose realization is scheduled to take between twenty-five and thirty years and is nonetheless propelled by the artist’s determination to reach the Black Sea. “Early Endeavors” surveys the most groups of works by Klara Hobza, illustrating the artist’s preparations, plans, and reflections and documenting the implementation or partial implementation of her actions. Contributions by Stefanie Böttcher, Georg Elben, and Gregory Volk complement the artist’s own writings.