Group exhibition "Nirgendwo" in Gallery Trotoar
On Friday, February 14, 2025, at 7 p.m., the Trotoar Gallery in Zagreb will open
the group exhibition Nirgendwo, which features works by Mila Panić, Igor Ruf, Marko Tadić and the duo TARWUK. As the exhibition curator Martina Marić Rodrigues points out in her introductory text: “The exhibition Nirgendwo (German: Nowhere) lets four micro-stories unfold – Mila Panić, Igor Ruf, Marko Tadić and TARWUK present works that exist on the thresholds between what is and what could be - neither fully rooted, nor fully deployed - but immersed in constant change.”
Marko Tadić, Souvenirs, detail, 2007. photo Damir Žižić © Trotoar (22)
The works from the exhibition Nirgendwo shape a space of indeterminacy – a state between present and absent, solid and unstable, past and what is yet to emerge. TARWUK's painting E oscillates between the corporeal and the ethereal, sculpting fluid forms that invoke collective and intimate transformation. In the installation Between Here and There, Mila Panić explores migration, displacement and her own search for belonging, exposing the tensions between movement and rooting. In the series Souvenirs, Marko Tadić reconstructs fragments of memory, weaving new stories from nostalgic materials of the past. Igor Ruf in Frizerski salon za brdo builds a narrative ambience that balances between playful and uneasy, playing with his own memories and surreal aspects of everyday life. Works from the Cerin Antonić collection are on display. The exhibition is open until March 15, 2025 and can be viewed during gallery opening hours from Wednesday to Friday from 11 am to 7 pm and on Saturdays from 10 am to 2 pm. The accompanying exhibition program will be announced later.
TARWUK, E, mixed media on canvas, 152 x 122 cm, 2018._Photo. Damir Žižić - detail of work
Text about the exhibition by curator Martina Marić Rodrigues
…continue, it is not established, as far as I am concerned, if I am the one who seeks, what I am actually seeking, I find, lose, find again, reject, seek again, find again, reject again, no I have never rejected anything, never rejected anything I have found, I have never found anything that I have not lost, I have never lost anything that I could not reject, if I am the one who seeks, finds, loses, finds again, loses again, searches further, finds again, finds no more, searches no more, searches further, finds again, loses again, searches no more, if I am the one who does it, and if it is not me who is, and what is it, and if it is not me who is, and what is it, I see nothing else at this moment, yes, yes, I conclude, it is not established… -The Unmentionable, Samuel Beckett
The layers of the world are grafted onto each other. Present and past futures grow together with future present and past. Everything happens in interpenetrations and transformations; in the branching of fine lines and the gaps between them. These gaps, the in-between states as WG Sebald 2 describes them, are the gaps in space and the gaps in time, the places where our existential nausea gathers. Faced with a reality that twists in on itself, as we try to fix meaning and conscience, we encounter the profound indeterminacy of the world. How do we live in a time that simultaneously shapes and transcends us? How do we understand who we are and what our presence is in a world that seems ambivalent about our existence? The exhibition Nirgendwo (German: Nowhere) lets four micro-stories unfold – Mila Panić, Igor Ruf, Marko Tadić and TARWUK present works that exist on the thresholds between what is and what could be – neither fully rooted, nor fully deployed – but immersed in constant change.
Marko Tadic - Souvenirs
Things (mostly) outlive us. The objects we create, live with, use, and eventually abandon are more enduring than we are; and not just in the physical sense. Even when they lose their original purpose, when we stop using them, they are still there, stubbornly persisting.
Marko Tadić is an artist who searches, sorts, stores - fills the reservoirs of memories - the physical and associative archive as the foundation of his practice. The work Souvenirs also relies on the inherited inventory of everyday life. His starting point is discarded memorabilia, antique wooden plaques with panoramas of various tourist destinations such as Dubrovnik, Zadar, Bled, Pula and various landscapes.
Marko Tadić, Souvenirs, detail, 2007. photo Damir Žižić © Sidewalk detail work (32)
Former spoils of ritual collection on trips, these small artifacts of personal history, objects are infinitely trivial and deeply significant as nostalgic reminders of the (good) old days. Thrown out of one life cycle, they retreat into memory warehouses from which Tadić pulls them out and bricolages them into new stories. His process reflects what Claude Lévi-Strauss called wild thought (la pensée sauvage) 3 , a way of intuitive and metaphorical thinking that extracts fragments and symbols from past experiences and combines them into new structures of meaning. With subtle or radical interventions, Tadić outsmarts clichéd tourist views. Familiar places are scattered, obscured or mutated, and an atmosphere of general melancholy creeps into them. Is this home (Was it ever home)?, Celebrating nonsense?, Wish you were here, are just some of the written messages. Although these are imaginary places, the traumatic core of life persists. Traumas, personal or collective, do not disappear, but through traces of the past remain permanently inscribed in our perception of reality. But in Tadić's practice, entropy is neither the goal nor the end, but part of the process. The warehouses and archives he explores return as places of pleasure in remembering, and in his objects as a constant negotiation between erasure and creation, voids and speculative futures.
Igor Ruf - Hairdresser for the hill
There is one place in this world / Where I would never live / But there are people who
place where you live / You are always alone there / And nothing pleases you / There is one place in this world /
On which the wind blows without stopping / Fiju Fu / Fiju Fuuu 4
Igor Ruf's work Hairdresser for the Hill was partly inspired by a documentary about an old Nepalese woman who, blinded by the harsh Himalayan sun, lived in darkness for years. When she finally regained her sight thanks to a mobile cataract clinic, she laughed out loud. And that's where Igor Ruf enters and things get...strange. I'm curious about what happened after all that. What kind of half-information did I get and what sense does it all make, I wonder, while my hair grows and grows. (IR) The old woman may be going to a hair salon that may exist, or she may be greeted only by the ghost of past haircuts. She returns to the top of the mountain, her hair defiantly fluttering in the wind, she herself becomes the landscape. In Ruf's vision, she is eternal. Like a mountain. Like a memory. The only possible image in this multitude of perceptions. (IR) The narrative tracking of Ruf's environments is demanding and deliberately divergent.
Igor Ruf Hairdressing salon for the hill, 2016, photo. Boris Cvjetanović
Events elude quick and clear identification, which often causes discomfort in the viewer (a valuable reaction, when successfully provoked). An indispensable part of his process is the exploration of his own memories - the duality of emerging from the past and re-immersing in it. In Frizerski salon za brdo he reveals himself: he performs his own songs, installs a cabinet de curiosités, his small eclectic collection from childhood, and in the author's comic book Brdo smrdo i borovi, the game of haircuts, which is very familiar to him, takes place. The scenographically powerful ambience of the Salon is organized according to the principle of an antique shop. The accumulation of various elements, whether objects, memories or experiences, creates the impression of an alternative, absurd space; after all, art has one advantage over the utilitarian world - it does not have to function.
TARWUK - E
A tangerine is peeled.
An unstruck sound is released. 
TARWUK photo Matthew Brown
TARWUK (Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić) operates as a symbiotic artistic entity - an organism that suspends individual identities in favor of the freedom of joint creative exploration. Authorship (...if it's not me who is and what is it...) exists exclusively as a collaborative process, a continuous and intuitive mutual exchange. The dynamics of TARWUK are reminiscent of the surrealist method of cadavre exquis 7 according to which all involved can add fragmented interventions and encourage the organic growth of multidisciplinary works. Image E was conceived as part of the installation Vernicular River Holds 6 Bodies Down, connected to the short film Grandma (2018) in the genre of cinéma vérité and SF, created in collaboration with Matthew Goedecke. In the film, family members play themselves, gathered around a table at a ritual matriarchal dinner where the main dish is served - the grandmother. The installation, a combination of paintings, photographs, sculptures, props and sound, was designed as a film scene - an approach to exhibition construction that TARWUK impressively develops in its recent projects. In TARWUK's practice, the mise-en-scène becomes the narrative framework of a performative situation - an environment into which the viewer enters believing that he is witnessing something already present. However, he soon realizes that he is dislocated from everyday life and called onto the stage for conscious participation. The abstract landscape of the painting E, with its Orphic geometric sign, represents a co-creation free from predictability and pre-determined direction. Through an iterative approach to the work - returning, building on, reshaping - layers of material and correspondence are layered, and the painting remains open, escaping the grip of fixed identification.
Mila Panić - Between here and there...Is 20 hours border crossing
...we can ask ourselves, for the sake of memory, why time doesn't pass, why it doesn't leave you,
but it is settling around you, moment by moment, from all sides, more and more, more and more densely and
thicker… 8
When people migrate, they also smuggle their own future. They carefully store it in folds
of the past, with fragments of memories and hopes. A future neither linear nor guaranteed; which is only just beginning to unfold.
It has to be fought for. Along with physical displacement, silent negotiations within identity also take place.
Conflicts of the emergence of the new in the old.
Mila Panić - photo Marlene Pfau
The most direct visualization of the state-in-between is brought by Mila Panić with her recent work from the cycle Südost Paket (Southeast Package), which she has been developing since 2017. The experience of life in the diaspora - in time, space and emotional distance - is channeled through the object of a bus tire. Rubber as a microcosm capsule that rolls along the well-trodden migrant route between Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In earlier installations from this series, Panić used ready-made tires, filling them with items such as cigarettes, perfumes and sweets; objects of imaginary prestige status that often travel in luggage. Her multimedia works personify the voices of small histories 9 , those who remained on the margins of dominant narratives. They indicate the impotence of establishing coherence between the personal and the collective, when actions and thoughts are repeated until they lose clarity and purpose, turning into fear, anger and existential paralysis. While some artists actively search for and explore the absurd, Mila Panić finds it unsolicited. And he can't get away from him. So he inhabits it, twists it and transforms it into sharp humor. The subtle installation at the Nirgendwo exhibition is also the most personal work from that cycle. Performed in acrystal, the tire makes a mark in the dust with its movement, writing the words Between Here and There, an intimate poeticization of its own uprooted identity. Rubber assumes the function of a white phantom of reality - present but impermanent and elusive, which dissipates easily like sand.