Pressegespräch - TARWUK - Fantastic Surrealists

We cordially invite you to the press talk on the show Бољи живоt by TARWUK and on the group show Fantastic Surrealists.

Curators Sandro Droschl and Jan Tappe will give a guided tour through the exhibitions.

Бољи живоt is the first solo exhibition in Austria by New York based artists TARWUK. Working as a single entity, Bruno Pogačnik Tremow (b. 1981, Zagreb) and Ivana Vukšić (b. 1981, Dubrovnik) center their practice around investigating Selfhood. Both were born in Yugoslavia, witnessing the war in the 1990s and the disintegration of a social order that followed it. The duo has been working together since 2014, creating sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, films, and installations that inform their multidisciplinary practice. Бољи живоt (Bolji život, in German Ein besseres Leben) was created in dialog with the specific architecture of the HALLE FÜR KUNSTSteiermark.

The exhibition Fantastic Surrealists takes a fresh look at the fantastic and its suppressed worlds. Along with Viennese Actionism, Fantastic Realism was probably the best-known genuinely Austrian contribution to the international art scene in recent decades, both of which developed in contrast to and for very different reasons from the most influential development at the time, Abstract Expressionism. It has been comparatively quiet around Fantastic Realism, although Surrealism and its various after-effects are in demand again, especially after the last Venice Biennale. But where does the surreal lie in the real? But isn’t Fantastic Realism and much of its work also about an ambiguous language game, that the fantastic is not in realism, but actually in surrealism? And finally, couldn’t this be the missing link for a currently productive consideration?