Great Expectations

The artist explores technological development within the transition from the analog to the digital age and man’s relationship with growing progress. Without hiding his own fascination with rapidly changing and developing technologies, he also reveals the other, disturbing side of this process, which is reflected in the inextricable connection between technology and the life of a common man. By creating an increasingly sensitive relationship to the use of technology in our lives, we are looking for justification for ever-increasing consumption. What are our ultimate or “big” expectations from this process is the question the artist poses to the audience.

The future is always desired, because it is unknown, in a certain way innocent and actually potential. We imagine it as a shining point of personal or collective existence, carefully planning every step in order to fulfill that idea as consistently as possible. The fastest way to reach the future is through imagination, which is vividly witnessed by science fiction, while history records confirmations in reality. The beginning of human history, marked by the emergence of intelligence, is inextricably linked with the emergence of machines (the first primitive tools – aids) and the projection of the future. I belong to the generation that watched Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke’s film “2001 A Space Odyssey” with a special kind of excitement. The relationship between technology and man is presented here with highly poetic means. The movie was made in 1968 and I believe most Millennials would find it too slow and indistinct. It is possible that I would look at him today with less attention and awe. The theme of the film is extremely topical because it raises the question of borderline moral values ​​in an unstoppable process that represents the game of human intelligence and striving, the great expectation that man invests in his own inventions with which he strives to control the future. As in the sixties of the last century, today the question of progress is a question of morality, and perhaps even more of spirituality itself. Isaac Asimov, American science fiction writer and Russian-born biochemist (1920-1992) said: The saddest aspect of life today is that science accumulates knowledge faster than society accumulates wisdom.

With the exhibition “Great Expectations” in the X VITAMIN gallery, Dragan Rajšić presents to the audience part of his reflections on this topic. He speaks from the position of a man who witnesses the transition from the analog to the digital age. This kind of experience is still not rare because we are living in the late spring of the digitization era. The future, it is certain, will erase such memories, and transmit them only through interpretation guided by different motives.

Through a series of sculptures in metal, the author conveys a precious ethos through a sincere boyish fascination with the “device” and the beauty of industrial material, which is also a kind of symbol of progress. Manual processing of metal achieves warmth and makes us connect directly with the object. The drawings are both sketches and works in their own right, with recognizable handwriting and origins. The work “Think of a Wish” is the most entertaining part of the exhibition. It represents a comet – shooting star and is constructed as an interactive object. The aluminum wall sculpture contains a mechanism that is connected to a pedal. By pressing the pedal on the sculpture, movement occurs. In addition to the name itself and the symbolic reminder that we should be careful what we wish for because wishes may come true, the author addresses the visitor of the exhibition as a consumer, doing the same in the work “A Comfortable View”. Are the limits of comfort a measure of our possibilities for progress, and are we afraid that the dream of the future can turn into a nightmare, is just one of the questions that Rajšić asks us, while at the same time he amazes us with the richness of his artistic imagination and skill.