Exhibited at the 58th October Salon (Dreamers) in 2021, Unboxing la Boîte won the Award of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, established in 2007 at the October Salon. According to the report of CCB’s jury, Ćosić’s piece was deemed exceptional due to how ”soberly and thoughtfully it established relationships between what had initially been local and international contexts, as well as the present moment, with the history of (avant-garde) art”.
“The source of its value is the fact it primarily addresses the visitor of the exhibition who is born and raised in Belgrade, instead of a hypothetical individual that is often presupposed in the world of art. In this sense, the piece is characterised by a full-blooded contextual distinction that places the local surroundings in a broader, global perspective through the author’s personal impressions. Unboxing la Boîte represents a process of unpacking a facsimile of Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise, i.e. the Box in a Suitcase (facsimile of series G from 1968, designed by Mathieu Mercier). The artist’s execution of the process is followed by consistent commentary that contextualises the object of the unpacking within the artist’s biography. His daughter is the camera woman, and the piece comes to life in the form of a home video. During the unpacking of the box-artwork, the artists narrates personal, familial and social contexts, often in a humorous and auto-ironic manner, while reminiscing of his youth in Belgrade, which he had left in 1991, bringing together references of the culture in which he had formed and global, historical artistic figures, such as Marcel Duchamp and the surrealists.”
Excerpt from the report of the jury, comprised by Svetlana Petrović, curator of CCB’s Fine Arts Gallery, Zorana Đaković-Minniti, program director at the CCB and Tijana Savatić, associate for the “Visual Arts and the Youth” project at the CCB
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon and the Artist Collection
Mining agreement: III-5-44/03.03.2023
Inventory no: 180
Photo: a square from the video artwork
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vuk Ćosić (1966, Belgrade, Yugoslavia), considered a pioneer of net.art, has been conducting interdisciplinary and innovative research into the language of art on the internet and its potential effects on modern society and life, since the early 1990s. He doesn’t stop at the simplified hypothesis that the net represents a practically endless space of freedom of expression, but, through his work and theoretical considerations, develops a generative and critical idea whose purpose is to highlight the importance of artistic action on the net within the broader context of inter-individual relationships. Thus is the complexity of modern life, with all its facets, put in the centre of a hybrid investigation in which the net – its vagaries and languages, its universal availability and immediate circulation – is being used, misused and abused as a starting point for a departure into something else, a space that is real, virtual and layered with meaning, all at the same time. Ćosić’s practice, simultaneously rooted in the present, projected towards the future and tied into the past, is further characterised by a blend of quotidian and artistic acts. If, following the artist’s paradoxical claim, “the art of the past was just a substitute for the internet”, then its very legacy can become a subject and object of new acts created and proliferated on the net. He is a co-founder of the Ljubljana Laboratory for Digital Media Ljudmila and Case Sensitive, a digital strategy company. He lives and works in Ljubljana.