Slavko Djuric, “Interdependance!”

Slavko Djuric
New York, New York

interdependAnce!
2019
double-bind artist book with interlocked pages; reduction screen printing, beeswax, handmade abaca paper (colophon), hot stamped title
Individual book 11 x .5 x 11”

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.page1image5768208Isolated, the book opens, the image halves split away, but their secrets don’t get revealed. 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!’ derive from a series of both cyborgian and feral self-portraits made as a part of a daily drawing practice. When drawing, I often tap into a meditative state reflecting upon our camaraderie being perplexed by its own algorithms. Going beyond the confines and trappings of the logic of the physical world, my line challenges an eye to follow it, while it fearlessly twists and turns in the vast blankness of the paper.page1image5801904Each 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