On Infinite Transformation

by Lav Mrenović
Independent Curator

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” 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.[1]

According to Karl Marx, mass production and the emergence of new commodities in the 19th century marked a rupture in the relationship to materials — this was the moment when all substances began to be perceived as raw materials for industry. At the same time, an economy emerged organized around fossil fuels, in an inseparable two-way relationship with rise of the modern nation-state. Contrary to Timothy Mitchell’s idea in Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2) that the exploitation of coal generated democratic institutions, Victor Seow argues in Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (3) that fossil capitalism did not create democracy, but rather fundamentally undemocratic technocratic modes of state governance. Artworks within that productivist regime became a form of material exploitation with a different purpose — expressing personal forms.

Modernity is characterized by flexibility, transience, and contestability. The mutability of amorphous masses of material provides an important metaphor here — both in terms of liquidity and in the sense of dismantling existing categories. Vujović’s artworks are always situated in in-between spaces of creation, without clear beginnings or endings, always in a state of transformation. They contain elements of chance, perishability, and destruction; it is never entirely clear whether they are being constituted or disintegrating, whether they result from an incident or from a long-term process. The emphasis on process as part of the final form of the work originates in the Renaissance — in unfinished artworks and sketches — and then in the 19th century it became integral to completed artworks (with Auguste Rodin as a key reference for the medium of sculpture). Another tension present in Vujović’s artworks lies between fragility and permanence, a tension intrinsic to sculpture as a medium. Ubiquitous are chance, indeterminacy, incompletion — damage, fracture, disintegration...

However, Vujović’s artworks are not merely illustrations or metaphors of social change. Their fragility also carries inevitable personal and lived experiences. The inherent burden of artistic labor is the exposure to industrial and chemical materials — the processing of which already encompasses an entire chain of industrial exploitation of both humans and “nature” before they even reach the artist’s studio, often impacting health. There is also the context of everyday life in Serbia, as in any other country within global capitalism, which is not a mere coincidence. Its specificities — from the expansion of resource-extractive industry to the lack of ecological regulation — imbue Vujović’s sculptures with potential new readings that are biographical, personal, and closely tied to local specificity.

[1] Adorno, Theodor. “Functionalism Today.” The Charnel House, 1965

[2] Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso Books, 2023.
Last accessed on Feb. 9, 2024.

[3] Seow, Victor. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. University of Chicago Press, 2023

…The exhibition title is drawn from Roland Barthes’ essay Plastic, in which he describes plastic as a material that embodies the “idea of endless change.” Written in the historical context of modernization and the boom in industrial production of consumer goods following World War II, Barthes’ text serves as one of the foundational references for reflecting on the contemporary collapse of the production, political, and social systems established in the postwar period. The notion of endlessness points to a continuity in Vujović’s formal experimentation and underscores that this exhibition does not represent a conclusion thereof; it also evokes the durability of the materials used amid growing awareness of the consequences of excessive plastic consumption. On the other hand, change is understood not only as an intrinsic quality of plastic, according to Barthes, but also of all other materials from an industrial perspective, as well as a common denominator of the problems of modernization and its consequences, which are ever-present in Vujović’s works.