…I resume, not the good fortune to establish, with regard to me, if it’s I who seek, what exactly it is I seek, find, lose, find again, throw away, seek again, find again, throw away again, no, I never threw anything away, never threw anything away of all the things I found, never found anything that I didn’t lose, never lost anything that I mightn’t as well have thrown away, if it’s I who seek, find, lose, find again, lose again, seek in vain, seek no more, if it’s I what it is, and if it’s not I who it is, and what it is, I see nothing else for the moment, yes I do, I conclude, not the good fortune to establish…
–The Unnamed, Samuel Beckett[1]
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,[2] 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.
Suveniri (Souvenirs)
Things (for the most part) outlast us. The objects we create, that we live with and use, and eventually abandon, can survive longer than we. And not just in the physical sense. Even when they lose their original function, when we stop using them, they are still here, stubbornly enduring.
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 Suveniri (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 such as Dubrovnik, Zadar, Bled, Pula, and various landscapes. 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 depositories of memory. From here, Tadić extracts them and uses them to create a bricolage of new stories. His process reflects what Clause Lévi-Strauss called the “wild thought” (la pensée sauvage),[3] an intuitive and metaphorical mode of thinking that extracts fragments and symbols from past experiences, joining them into new meaning structures.
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. “Is this home (Was it ever home)?”, “Celebrating nonsense?”, and “Wish you were here” are just some of the messages that have been written on them. Though they are imaginary places, life’s traumatic core remains. Traumas, both personal and collective, do not disappear, but rather remain permanently inscribed on our perception of reality, through the traces of the past. But 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, and in his objects as a constant negotiation between erasure and creation, “empty spaces” and speculative futures.
Frizerski salon za brdo (Hairdresser for the Hill)
There’s a place in this world / Where the wind blows endlessly / Woosh Woo / Woosh Wooo[4]
[ . . . ]
The most direct visualisation of the “in-betweens” is offered 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 and Hercegovina. In earlier installations from this series, Panić used ready-made tyres, filling them with items such as cigarettes, perfume, and sweets; items that have a prestigious, though imaginary, status, and which frequently travel in migrants’ baggage. Her multimedial works personify the voices of “small histories”,[5] 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. While some artists actively seek and investigate the absurd, Mila Panić finds it without looking. And cannot get away from it. And so she occupies it, twisting and transforming it into a sharp humour.
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.
–text by Martina Marić Rodrigues
[1] Samuel Beckett, The Unnamed (L’Innommable)
[2] W.G.Sebald, Austerlitz
[3] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought (La Pensée Sauvage)
[4] Igor Ruf’s voice interpretation, audio part of the Frizerski salon za brdo installation
[5] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Nirgendwo: Mila Panić, Igor Ruf, Marko Tadić, TARWUK
Feb 14 – Mar 15, 2025
Trotoar Gallery
Zagreb, Croatia
