Slavko Djuric (b.1979, Yugoslavia) is a multidisciplinary artist trained in traditional printmaking at the University of Art in Pristina, Serbia. His practice spans from drawing and photography to artist books and site specific installations. His recent work explores the interchangeable nature and fluctuating structures of his art objects. Slavko has been based in NYC since 2006.

Artist Statement:

In the past few years I’ve been developing a work based on double-bind book structures. By introducing a second spine to the book it allows me to reassess the pre-existing content by physically cutting through it. The deconstruction of the integrity of pages and an emerging modular character, open a new perspective for interplay within the book format. New narratives or digressions are born with every turn of a page; I’m not even trying to comprehend these innumerable variations of the layouts of the pages. Thus, I regard myself as an initiator of the endless interchangeable play rather than as a book author.

In this project I have challenged myself to develop a gregarious edition of books linked into a freestanding installation. These 12 books can be still seen as copies or as individual objects, but the synaptic connections between them allude to the books being interlocked elements of a bigger structure, a circular group-dance or perhaps even a tribe.

Isolated, as the book opens and the image halves split away, its secret doesn’t reveal itself in front of the viewer. It is only in the presence of other books that one would be able to grasp the scope of this project.

The images of ‘interdependAnce!’ originate from a series of introspective drawings made as a part of a daily art practice, later turned into a series of reductive screenprints. A portrait as both personal and cultural document, permeates the complexity of human experience in an effort to capture a vital (dis)balance. These unintentionally made self-portraits arose from the selfless state of mind, reflecting upon the constant flux between our feral and cyborgian nature. 

Each book opens with a line from the poem ‘Raskovnik’ by a Serbian poet Branko Miljković: 

“Otvori kamen sto prećuta zvezde svojoj tami“

which reads as

“Open the stone which hasn’t mentioned the stars to its own darkness“