TARWUK (Bruno Pogacnik Tremow & Ivana Vukšic) with Jason Rosenfeld

TARWUK (Bruno Pogacnik Tremow & Ivana Vukšic) are a collaborative duo from Croatia who have been working together since 2014. They make sculptures and installations that conjure unknown rituals and traumatic scenes of war and devastation. They use a range of materials—wax, rope, pigments, wood, plaster—to evoke the feeling of having just stumbled on a story whose totality will never be told. Their installations invite projection and prediction, allowing the viewer to imagine their own narratives. Their works challenge assumptions by imposing personal, speculative stories that create a complex and generative system of meaning, materializing their personal histories into objects. For Tremow and Vukšic, “work and life… are one.” Their work reflects their upbringing, first in socialist Yugoslavia and later in post-socialist Croatia. They were raised in a war zone, with our families and our houses being torn apart. They seek to challenge the mechanisms and assumptions of society by imposing intensely personal speculative fabulations as possible alternatives.

Jason Rosenfeld, PhD is Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College. He was co-curator of the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He has contributed the lead text for a Phaidon monograph on Cecily Brown that will be published in November 2020. He is a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.