Having shared a studio for seven years, Arlene Wandera (b. Nairobi, Kenya) and Richard Zeiss (b. Vienna, Austria) started collaborating in 2015 under the umbrella of “Duck & Rabbit Projects", a reference to Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit illusion.

The project was initiated as an inquiry, into how their vastly different cultural and artistic backgrounds would translate into a show setting; how the viewers would experience the work; whose work would set the tone in which context; and whether the show would be experienced as a sum of its parts, or morph into something new and different altogether. 

The differences of the two artists with regard to physical, racial, and cultural parameters as well as in terms of gender and art medium also prompted them to develop work with and around ideas connected to artistic identity and difference, and to question how these ideas can be negotiated in diverse cultural contexts. 

As a result, Duck & Rabbit materialises in dependence of location and spatial specificities whose aim is to engage the viewer to experience the push and pull the two artistic approaches exert on each other and within a space.

 © Duck & Rabbit Projects 2022