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 KUNST Steiermark.
At the center of the artists’ work is experimenting with Selfhood, blurring the boundaries between the individuals and closely observing the dynamic conditioning of Self in relation to society. Through the artists’ ongoing collaborative practice, in which there is no division of labor, the dividing line between one person and the other becomes completely permeable. In that sense, TARWUK emerges as an overarching entity, capable of dissolving the boundaries of the Self, allowing the two to constantly merge and produce new, unanticipated work.
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Бољи живоt shows the artists’ strong sensitivity for the environment of the exhibition, and also their wish to create a larger context with their works in which the representative functions of art are undermined. TARWUK thus constantly erode dogmatic ideas as to what art can and should be, and they confront us with our own states of being, which determine what we see when we see their works.