For more than two decades, Milutin Gubash has been developing a body of work deeply rooted in experience, combining humor, social criticism, and the poetry of everyday life. His practice navigates between staging and documentary, between the personal and the political, relying on a deliberately unstable aesthetic—made up of modest materials, offbeat gestures, and fragmented narratives. He brings into play his own history, that of his loved ones, and more broadly that of the figures and objects that modernity has rendered invisible.
Long focused on family stories and autofictional performances, his work has recently taken a more explicitly political turn. In his recent installations, Gubash questions the logic of production, waste, and displacement through immersive devices that interweave animated sculptures, disused sets, absurd machines, and narrative videos. He depicts characters in situations of social marginalization or cultural uprooting—migrants, invisible workers, figures from minority narratives—who ingeniously reconfigure discarded objects to create new narratives, new uses, and new forms of value.
Gubash constructs worlds that resemble ruined theaters, where resourcefulness becomes a critical strategy and discarded materials come to life. He gives voice to what is left behind—objects, memories, gestures, stories—and subtly questions the aesthetic, economic, and cultural norms that shape our perceptions. Thus, his art acts as a gentle form of resistance, a factory of critical, fragile, and lucid fictions capable of shaking up dominant narratives and opening up breaches toward other ways of inhabiting the world.
Milutin Gubash is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice combines video, installation,photography, and performance. Born in Serbia and arriving in Canada as a child, he explores the tensions between personal memory, collective narrative, and shifting identities. Combining humor, self-deprecation, and a critical eye, his works address family, immigration, the power of images, and, more recently, the excesses of consumerism and capitalism. His work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally and is included in major collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Musée d'art de Joliette.
He is the winner of the 2019 Louis-Comtois Prize and has received several grants, including two residencies from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, in Paris in 2016 and Rome in 2024.
