Vuk Ćuk’s exhibition “Desert Hideaway” at Automat Saarbrücken represents the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in Germany. Being developed as an ensemble, as one coherent spatial work, the show introduces installations, sculptures and video art never exhibited before and produced in the months leading up to the exhibition. Connecting lines between the pieces are being drawn by recurring kinetic components, a common aesthetics and setting or related materiality.
These sculptural technoids and installations resemble landscapes or apparatuses that send out one thing in particular: Artificiality, a central research domain of the artist.
With his objects Ćuk investigates observable desires and projections of society and works up archetypes of consumption. He comments on the psychosocial influence of over-spinning technological innovations whose dazzling hype creates self-referential, ephemeral values and even becomes a misanthropic pop-tech culture.
At that Ćuk’s turn to create techzombies by connecting technological implants or frameworks with nature-distorting material such as plastic plants or artificial fur is a satirical reappraisal that produces self-ironic, incapacitated images of the fascination of Fake. In his work the mechanisation or reification of nature is a recurring artistic means of expression.
Referring to hypocrisy, trend-orientation or the constant eagerness of the superego to recreate, the artist configures plastic/technology/nature material hybrids into a synthetic ecosystem.
That interlocking group of works uses exaggeration, playfulness or theatricality to question the individual’s capacity for reflection and resilience in the face of the psychological burden of digital capitalism and pacing. Through the sculptural approach of an androidisation and artificialisation of landscape, object and body his works address contemporary distortions of values or political thought and action as a consequence of the oppressive fixation on technology and digital space.
Ćuk embeds in his assemblages objects of status, of fashion which are de-aesthetised and de-subjectivised by their mass consumption; even parodied by forgery they are still meant to signify the opposite, like cloned individuality. He examines symbols and emblems for their utilisation and usability for the dream, which does not reveal but alienates and allows numbness. The concept of the future in the Anthropocene is a frighteningly blurred one, so that dream, illusion or even falsification are applied to reality in order not to abandon oneself to powerlessness. Thus self- deception, consumption rush and exploitation of resources become short-sighted attempts to create an artificial concept of freedom – and thus, in the long run, unfreedom.
In the end escaping into the desert seems to be last placebo to obliterate the approaching epiphany: The vastness becomes the hiding place without echo, the hiding place becomes the self. When the self then finds the oasis, it thirsts over its reflection instead of drinking. As in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, colonisation and subjugation by the consumer industry even reaches there, an actually sublime place whose roughness and boundless physicality represent deprivation and thus inner purification.
The exhibition confronts the question of whether the hiding place of the desert can nevertheless lead to transcendence or catharsis. Ćuk constructs his tragicomic synth-tech chimeras as representatives of an absurd zeitgeist that formulate a need for negotiation about the inflation of ruthless individualisation and insatiable (digital) confirmation of one’s own existence.
Ćuk irritates here with a motor-controlled cyborg flora and fauna that machine off movement loops and through the sculptural setting grotesquely reveal what kind of creatures would probably inhabit that oasis.
Their detailed connections of electronic and nature-alienating elements are commentators on the rising disunity and diverse deracination of technologized societies. They constitute bodies or environments that immerse their ghostly unreality in a dreadful-sweet joke: Training the viewer to experience smiling with a metallically bitter aftertaste, Desert Hideaway allows to observe Ćuk’s cyborg ballet staggering between utopia and dystopia.
Timo Poeppel