As the pseudonymous artistic duo describe: TARWUK is a ‘condition’, and this ‘condition’ is their practice.1 Foregoing their individual identities to inhabit a single artistic entity, TARWUK refer to the 1960s and ’70s avant-garde collectives of their native, former Yugoslavia, for whom collaboration was both method and ideology. Driven by an existential enquiry into the boundaries of the self, TARWUK is firstly a ‘research into selfhood’2, an experimental union that strains the limit of what artmaking can be. Revisionist by nature and diverse in output, their multi-faceted practice draws upon a wide range of functions and fragments. Though their work may involve painting, sculpture, installation and performance, ‘mediums are different venues to explore a collaborative approach; they’re not ends in and of themselves.’3
Their move from Eastern Europe to New York City in the early 2010s – and the marked change in social tenor and political timbre that accompanied it – may account for TARWUK’s interrogations of the self, as well as their affinity with the travelling fragment. Taking cues from the radical dramatist Bertolt Brecht, whose oeuvre is characterised by its fragmentary nature, TARWUK work with the piecemeal contents of culture: allegories, symbols, recurring motifs. In sculptural works such as KLOSKLAS_1_dioV_citsemoD_elbatneserpernu_si_efiL (2023), techniques of montage and assemblage can be found. Involving the collection and bringing together of disparate pieces, such techniques speak to the transience of unity while emphasising contradiction and juxtaposition. Regarding the fragment as part of an artistic vocabulary befitting an unstable and restless contemporary, their working strategy prioritises endless recombination and encourages the creation of other, new forms. If Brecht’s life’s work contended that reality is only graspable through a world of interconnections, TARWUK, in turn, seeks to foster such a world.
In the spirit of Richard Wagner’s mid-1800s concept of gesamtkunstwerk – the ‘total work of art’ or ‘all-embracing art form’ – TARWUK look to the hallmarks of theatre as principles of work. Theatre is taken as a multi-modal, transdisciplinary site that folds different skills, mediums and materials into itself, for its resonance with their approach. In sprawling installation projects such as ‘Conceived for the Stage’ (2023), for example, TARWUK combine plastic artforms with spatial choreography to structure the encounter between viewer, the work of art, and its means of navigation. By extension, TARWUK are also fascinated by ‘the practices they [theatre] use to create something a viewer will disappear in’. Engaging with ideas of immersion and dissolution, such as their ‘condition’ as TARWUK allows, they use theatre as a metaphor to gesture towards the exchange that takes place within a setting, be it their studio or the exhibition space. Their practice privileges multiplicity and becoming over fixity and outcome, as they attest: ‘What we are really working with is the process, and the psychoanalytic sense of process, more broadly.’
TARWUK develops out of an intrigue with the unconscious, and the shared drama that their collaboration entails. Every day spent in the studio propagates challenges and surprises, as the two halves of the mind that is TARWUK must negotiate their work, seeing to its re-writing and over-writing, as if in conspiracy against itself. Within this, theatre’s aptitude for proposition and roleplay comes to bear, as a forum collapsing realism and naturalism, altered time and real time, that involves the suspension of belief and disbelief at once. Certain radical psychotherapeutic practices in 1970s France and Italy also drew from tenets of theatre: utilising the unpredictable dynamics of exchange in group settings to elasticate the concept of ‘I’. Similarly, the ‘condition’ that is TARWUK appeals to the individual’s capacity for porosity, while centring empathy and soluble boundaries between self and other. No longer rigid or siloed, this expansion of identity foregrounds the possibility of transformation inherent to every individual. As Antonin Artaud writes in The Theatre and Its Double (1958): ‘In the true theatre a play disturbs the senses’ repose, frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt.’4
Following their interest in theatre and psychoanalysis, language and time are treated as material for desiccation in TARWUK’s practice. Recognisable art historical motifs, whether Byzantine symbols or Art Nouveau foliage, are visible in works like MRTISKLAAH_dnab_ehT, (2023). Such motifs can be seen to migrate or iterate but otherwise remain untethered from specifics of time and place. Dense with referents yet temporally fractal, TARWUK adopt a transhistorical view: that such signs form part of a collective repository rather than follow a progressive, linear trajectory. Artwork titles, meanwhile – seemingly garbled file names, replete with underscores and rogue capitalisation – are written in reverse. This, they say, is to construct a ‘mental lineage which, starting from the memory of the Greek statuary, walks it backward to a memory of an undefined pre-consciousness’.5
Undermining the primacy of language as a tool for communication and expression, TARWUK variously introduce concrete poetry, script fragments and foreign languages into their works, to point to its myriad and mutant incarnations.
What results as artwork from these processes is merely an expressive symptom of the TARWUK ‘condition’. Regardless of medium, their artworks are germinations arising from a collaborative relay of questions, digressions and backdoors – a welter of forms and fragments intended to convey both the instability of the self, and the fissures of the world it occupies. Between a radical open-endedness and complete immersion, TARWUK’s practice ‘functions as a complex organism’ crossing cycles of art and life: ‘a network of subgroups, family factions, friends, landscapes, rituals and events, that continuously return to the body of TARWUK.’
1 The Breakdown of Distance: TARWUK, “Conceived for the Stage” at White Cube, Paris by Max L. Feldman
2 The Breakdown of Distance: TARWUK, “Conceived for the Stage” at White Cube, Paris by Max L. Feldman
3 Unless otherwise stated, all artist quotes issue from unpublished notes and conversation, Spring 2025.
4 Antonin Artaud,
The Theatre and Its Double (1958), p.28
5 As quoted in the exhibition text, ‘
Posadila sam kost u zimskom vrtu’, TARWUK, White Cube Mason’s Yard, 1 February – 18 March 2023.
