On Infinite Transformation

Few Notes on Materials and the Personal in Ana Vujović’s Artworks

Previous texts on Ana Vujović’s artworks have been primarily interpretative, focusing on the semantic layer - especially on themes such as the crisis of national identity, anxieties surrounding the digital age, and the porous boundaries between organic and industrial materials. All of these interpretations are more or less correct and relevant to Vujović’s work, however in this short text I would like to draw attention to a few aspects that seem to me insufficiently addressed in those readings. First and foremost, I mean focusing on the sculptural values of her artworks, more precisely their materials, as well as Vujović’s personal imprint within them, which I find particularly significant in this exhibition that shows a clear and sustained continuity in her practice so far.

Theodor Adorno in his lecture on modernist architecture titled Functionalism Today (Adorno) writes about the history accumulated in materials: “Clearly there exists, perhaps imperceptible in the materials and forms which the artist acquires and develops something more than material and forms. Imagination means to innervate this something. This is not as absurd a notion as it may sound.  For the forms, even the materials, are by no means merely given by nature, as an unreflective artist might easily presume. History has accumulated in them, and spirit permeates them. What they contain is not a positive law; and yet, their content emerges as a sharply outlined figure of the problem. Artistic imagination awakens these accumulated elements by becoming aware of the innate problematic of the material.” That history of material does not disappear through the act of its artistic transformation, nor through emphasizing the form, nor through adherence to the structural laws of material — it remains present as both object of and resistance to aesthetic intervention.

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