TARWUK / Fantastic Surrealists

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is pleased to present a journey into the shallows of history and consciousness with two exhibitions. Both the solo exhibition by TARWUK and the art-historical group exhibition Fantastic Surrealists trace the uncanny. Coming from different directions temporally and regionally yet universally understandable on an emotional level, they both revolve around deeply human themes.

TARWUK
Bolji Život 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 the 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. Bolji Život (bolji život, a better life) was created in a 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. However, the dissolution of the Self as practiced by TARWUK is primarily driven by the idea of thinking identity outside of the prefabricated templates that history, language, and politics produce. The title of the exhibition Bolji Život refers to a Yugoslav television series broadcast between 1987 and 1991, that tells stories from the everyday lives of an average family of five in the post-Tito era.

Curated by Cathrin Mayer.

Fantastic Surrealists
With Eva Aeppli, Walter Behrens, Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, Helmut Leherb, Anton Lehmden, Kurt Regschek, Curt Stenvert.

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? 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? HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark undertakes the attempt to examine works from this “fantastic” period in terms of their “surreal” presentness.

Curated by Sandro Droschl.


Program, discourse and art education: halle-fuer-kunst.at
Press inquiries: Helga Droschl