The Balkan Frontier

Teršek and Tomašević explore the Balkans through travel and dialogue, creating images that reflect its layered histories, complex identities, and overlapping cultural currents.

The Balkan peninsula is a curious invention. By some accounts, a straight line drawn from Trieste in Italy to Odessa in Ukraine might serve as the northern border of this so-called peninsula, declaring all that lies southwardly as Balkan. Yet, such a line fails to capture the essence of what truly constitutes any region - its elusiveness, its refusal to conform to rigid borders or static definitions. The Balkans are not defined by cartographic precision but by layers of history, tangled identities, and overlapping cultural currents. As a consequence, we are left with places, rituals and gestures imbued with a Balkan quality, shaped by these complex historical interactions.
Developed through extensive travel across the region, this project is rooted in a shared practice of movement and dialogue. Working as a duo from Croatian and Slovenian backgrounds, the artists bring different yet closely linked perspectives into a collaborative process in which perception is negotiated and authorship deliberately blurred. The images are the outcome of continuous observation and discussion, forming a collective gaze that reflects the fragmented, overlapping nature of the region itself and resists reduction to a singular narrative.