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 solutions by April 11, 2021, as answers to the current topic of this year’s edition: The Principle of Hope.

After a year of the 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.

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 sparkle optimism and draw others into action? In what way would you, your intervention, transform the observer into an actor and arouse him to think about reality, not necessarily as it is, but how it could be? By words, 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?

Black box

​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 Zornića estate near Belgrade, suggesting with the festival’s slogan “The Hug” that nature has become an inevitable agent of positive social change and artists provoked to answer the topic of the competition through individual artistic interventions in the open space. Individual interventions, through the process of collective work on the development of competition ideas, with the mentoring of the project curator, professor Marko Lađušić, will be interconnected in a system of interventions and form a unique artistic body.

Mikser festival

​This year’s expert jury consists of Marko Lađušić, sculptor, professor at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, author of the project, Ervin Dubrović, art historian, director of the Museum of the City of Rijeka, Denis Leo Hegić, curator founder of Supermarket Lab and director of MON Museum of Now Berlin, Fiona Sinđelić Stefanović, designer, creative director of Supermarket Lab Berlin, Maja Lalić, architect, creative director of the Mixer Festival, and Jelena Pavlović, 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 discussions with relevant experts from the region, such as curator
Ervin Dubrovic, director of the Rijeka City Museum, a member of this
year’s Black Box selection committee.

​The competition is open until April 11, 2021. The results of the
the competition will be published on April 15
on the website www.mikser.rs and on the social networks of the Mikser organization. From the moment of the announcement to the beginning of the Mikser festival the selected authors will participate in the process of developing workshops in cooperation with the curator and mentors of the project. The works selected in the competition will be displayed as part of the collective exhibition “Black Box: The 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 Zornić House complex.

Applications are made by filling out​ an electronic form​
http://formulari.mikser.rs/blackbox-2021/.

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.