Theater director Łukasz Twarkowski's new multimedia production, "ROHTKO," is set to open at London's Barbican Centre on October 2. The four-hour performance, which premiered in Riga in 2022, uses onstage action, video screens, and a techno soundtrack to explore the nature of authenticity in art, taking the Knoedler & Co. forgery scandal—which involved fake Rothko, Pollock, and Motherwell paintings—as a central narrative thread.
The production uses the Chinese concept of "Shanzhai," which celebrates clever counterfeits as playful deconstructions, to challenge Western art world values of originality and provenance. By staging the story in a knockoff Chinese restaurant and moving from the 1960s to the digital NFT era, the work questions whether emotional responses to art are invalidated if the artwork itself is a forgery, probing the increasingly blurred lines between real and fake in contemporary culture.