Trotoar is pleased to present Nirgendwo, a group exhibition featuring works by Mila Panić, Igor Ruf, Marko Tadić, and TARWUK (Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić), curated by Martina Marić Rodrigues. The exhibition is on view from February 14 to March 15, 2025.
The layers of the world graft themselves onto one another. Present and past futures grow and entwine with future presents and pasts. All of this takes place in the midst of permeations and transformations; in the branching out of fine lines and the empty spaces between them. These “empty spaces”, “in-betweens” as W.G. Sebald dubs them, are gaps in space and rifts in time, places where our existential nausea is collected. Confronted with a reality that twists into itself, we struggle to make sense of the world and are at once faced with its deeply indeterminable nature. How can one live in a time that at once shapes us and transcends us? How can we understand who we are, and our presence in a world that seems ambivalent to our existence?
At the exhibition Nirgendwo (meaning “nowhere” in German), four micro-stories are allowed to develop. Mila Panić, Igor Ruf, Marko Tadić, and TARWUK exhibit works that exist on the “thresholds” between that which is and that which might be – neither fully rooted, nor fully displaced – but rather immersed in constant change.
Marko Tadić is an artist that searches, sifts through, stores – fills up the reservoirs of memory – a physical and associational archive that is the foundation of his artistic practice. In the work Souvenirs he likewise relies on an inherited inventory of the everyday. He begins with discarded memorabilia, old wooden plates featuring panoramas of various tourist destinations. Once the spoils of travellers’ collecting rituals, these small artefacts reflecting personal history are items that are immensely trivial and at the same time deeply meaningful as nostalgic reminders of the (good) old days. Pushed out of one life cycle, they retreat to the reservoirs of memory. From here, Tadić extracts them and uses them to create a bricolage of new stories. Through subtle or radical interventions, Tadić “outmanoeuvres” the clichéd touristic vedute. Familiar places are scattered, obscured, or mutated, and a general air of melancholy creeps in. Though they are imaginary places, life’s traumatic core remains. In Tadić’s work entropy is neither the aim nor the endpoint, but rather a part of the process. The depositories and archives that he explores return as places where one can find pleasure in melancholy.
Following the narratives in Igor Ruf’s installations is challenging and intentionally divergent. Events elude fast and clear identification, which frequently creates a sense of discomfort in viewers. Through a refined technique designed to confuse, the foundation of his process breaks through clearly: rooting around in his own memories the duality of surfacing from the past and diving back into it once again. In Hairdresser for the Hill, Ruf exposes himself on a deeply personal level: through the hum of a song that he performs himself, through a variety of small personal items arranged in a cabinet de curiosités, through a comic he wrote, entitled Smelly Hill and the Pine Trees, in which the hair-cutting game is played out – a game he knows all too well from his childhood. Hairdresser Salon’’s atmosphere has a scenographic power and is organised according to the principle of the antique shop; every item arranged within the work contributes its own history and meaning. The accumulation of various elements, memories, and experiences creates a sense of an unusual, alternative space; a potential reality that opens up like a collection of meanings, rather than a linear sequence of events.
TARWUK (Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić) function as a symbiotic artistic entity – an “organism” that suspends individual identities for the sake of the freedom of collective creative expression. The act of creation exists solely as a collaborative process, a continuous and intuitive mutual exchange. The painting E was conceived as a part of the installation Vernacular River Holds 6 Bodies Down, a combination of pictures, photographs, sculptures, props, and sounds, was arranged like a film set – an approach to creating exhibitions that TARWUK has been developing impressively in their recent projects. The abstract landscape of E, with its orphic geometric sign, represents collective creation freed from predictability and a predetermined direction. Through an iterative approach – returning, adding to, reshaping – layers of materials and correspondences are created, while the image remains open, avoiding the clutches of fixed identification.
The most direct visualisation of the “in-betweens” is presented by Mila Panić in her recent works from the cycle Südost Paket (Southeast Package), which she has been developing since 2017. She channels the experience of living in the diaspora – at a temporal, spatial, and emotional “distance” – through an object: the bus tyre. A tyre that, as a capsule of a microcosmos, tumbles along the well-trod migrant route between Germany and Bosnia. Her multimedial works personify the voices of “small histories”, those that have remained on the margins of dominant narratives. They highlight the impossibility of establishing a unity between the personal and the collective, when actions and thoughts repeat until they lose their clarity and purpose, transforming into fear, anger, and existential paralysis. Her subtle installation at the Nirgendwo exhibition is also her most personal work from this cycle. Created using acrystal, as it turns the tyre leaves a trace in the dust, which spells out the words “Between Here and There”, an intimate poetization of her own uprooted identity. The tyre takes on the function of the white spectre of reality – present but shifting and impossible to catch, which is easily scattered, just like dust.
From the exhibition text by Martina Marić Rodrigues
