Black Box Art Competition – The Principle of Hope

The Mikser Festival and the Faculty of Applied Arts (FPU) in Belgrade invite young authors to participate in the BLACK BOX art competition and submit their conceptual artworks by April 11, 2021, as answers to the current year’s topic The Principle of Hope.

After a year of great slowdown caused by the global pandemic, the Mikser Festival encourages young creators to a new energy cycle of creation and optimism. Inspired by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and his literary work “Principle of Hope”, Mikser invites authors to use the semantic interpretation of utopia in which the “principle of hope” is a prerequisite for creating a better future as a starting point in considering their competitive solutions, reality, and the future.

What kind of future do you want and what are you doing to achieve it? How to overcome skepticism, defeatism, discouragement of the individual and society as a whole? Can your work inspire optimism and move others into action? In what way would you, by your intervention, turn the observer into an actor and arouse him to think about reality, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be? Word, sound, performance, symbolic sign in space, creating a place of contemplation of the future or a meditative point in nature, a model of your utopia, marking real space with” totems “of hope?

In response to the challenges of the pandemic, this year’s Black Box exhibition and the Mikser Festival event will be held under the auspices of nature, in the ambiance of the Zornica House complex near Belgrade, suggesting with the festival slogan “Embrace” that nature has become an inevitable agent of positive social change, and the artists are called upon to answer the topic of the competition through individual artistic interventions in the open space. Individual interventions will be through the process of collective work on the development of competition ideas, with the mentoring of the project curator, prof. Marko Lađušić, to be interconnected in a system of interventions and to form a unique artistic whole.

This year’s expert jury consists of Marko Ladjusic, sculptor, professor at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, author of the project, Ervin Dubrovic, art historian, director of the Museum of the City of Rijeka, Denis Leo Hegic, curator founder of Supermarket Lab and director of the MON Museum of Now Berlin, Fiona Sinđelic Stefanovic, designer, creative director of Supermarket Lab Berlin, Maja Lalic, architect, creative director of the Mikser Festival and Jelena Pavlovic, producer and director, winner of the Black Box 2020. competition.

In addition to participating in the central art program of the Mikser Festival, the awarded authors will have the opportunity to participate in talks with relevant experts from the region, such as curator Ervin Dubrović, director of the Rijeka City Museum, member of this year’s Black Box selection committee.

The competition is open until April 11, 2021. The results of the competition will be published on April 15 on the website www.mikser.rs and on the social networks of the Mikser organization. In the period from the announcement of the results to the beginning of the Mikser Festival, the selected authors will participate in development workshops in cooperation with the curator and mentors of the project. The works selected in the competition will be exhibited as part of the collective exhibition “Black Box: Principle of Hope” at the Mikser Festival 2021, from May 26 to 28, and after the festival will remain on display as part of the permanent collection of the Zornica House complex.

Applications are made by filling out an electronic form.

The Black Box project was created in 2015. in cooperation with the Mikser Festival and the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade as a platform to support the development of young authors in the field of fine arts and the presentation of their work to the general public. An expert jury consisting of well-known artists and educators from the entire region, based on the current topic of the competition, selects authors who will present themselves as part of a collective art installation at the Mikser Festival. The aim of the project is to point out the issues that occupy young creators in the contemporary social context, their empowerment to express themselves publicly and contribute to the solution of social problems with their visions, and the improvement of life in the community.