Lucky Couples
video
9ʼ45”
edition: 2/5
2003–2004.
The work is about deconstructing the process of creating a fantasy of love and happiness. Such fantasies are stereotypes created under the influence of the mass media, films, commercials and magazines.
Responding to the stereotypes that digital media produce when it comes to the idealized image of a “happy couple”, the artist assumes various roles, imitating certain situations that she recognizes as typical. The work is also connected with the series of digital prints with the same title and theme. Scenes of couples where a happy ending is the only certainty underline the ideology of consumerist culture.
At the 45th October Salon, she exhibited the work A Head of Sugar, a stylized sculpture in the shape of a human heart in the size of a head, made of sugar.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Gift Contract: III-5-286/1/22.9.2014.
Inventory No. 1346
Photo: still from the video work
Couple in Transition
sculpture, bronze
2013
Couple in Transition represents a male–female couple as a by-product of a failed transition. It is part of the Status Symbols Series, created through modifying children’s toys – superheroes, jeeps, castles and animals.
On the pedestal, as is the case with celebrities, there is a female character in which we recognize a Barbie doll upgraded with implants, while the male character, Venom, is dressed in a formal jacket. The interventions that the artist applied to both characters speak in favour of status symbols that, during the period of unsuccessful economic transition and throughout the 1990s in Serbia, made values such as education, culture and humanity completely senseless.
Couples like that could be found in different periods, and we can recognize the successors of those from the 1990s, three decades later, in starlets, entertainers and offenders who are latently associated to politics.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5-480/1/15.12.2014.
Inventory No. 1384
Photo: Milan Kralj
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Maja Rakočević Cvijanov (1975, Subotica, Serbia). She graduated in sculpture and received a master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, workshops and symposia in Serbia and abroad. She works as a sculptor-conservator at the Inter-municipal Institute for Protection of Cultural Monuments in Subotica and teaches sculpture at the Secondary Polytechnic School in Subotica; the author of five public monuments on the territory of Subotica, where she lives and works.