Art Critics' Choice ...
Dragana Sapanjoš: PROMISES OF ETERNITY

The practice of visual artist Dragana Sapanjoš blends personal experience with social critique. She is interested in the body – not as an idealized form, but as a point of pressure, projection, and control. In this exhibition, she moves between the material and the digital, between the fragility of glass and the cool aesthetics of print, revealing how contemporary mythologies shape our understanding of identity, age, and power.

Aging is rude (2013, blown glass, 140 × 100 cm) explores aging in a time that no longer grants old age its rightful place. Once synonymous with wisdom and authority, aging is now perceived as almost rude – something to conceal, smooth over, or erase. The blown-glass inscription is quiet and fragile rather than aggressive; its legibility shifts with the distancing of the gaze, much like the visibility of the aging body in public space. Glass,both transparent and breakable, underscores transience, while also highlighting our attempts to hide it.

The work Become another man again (2023, print) shifts into the digital sphere of simulation. The figure of the Wizard hovers in a new dimension as the controller of a world in which ordinary people become avatars. The pyramid above his head – borrowed from The Sims –symbolises a state of achievement, a freedom that is in fact conditioned by the game’s algorithm. To the side of the artwork, a figure borrowed from Bosch’s imaginary appears, almost a pop icon trying to whisper something, yet unable to assert any real influence.
Both works can be read through the prism of the transhumanist promise of eternal youth. We used to hide our wrinkles; now we are promised bodily enhancements, life in the cloud, and digital immortality – an extended version of The Matrix. Yet this gleaming vision of perpetual optimization reveals itself as a new form of control: youth becomes a program, the body a platform, and the human being a character in a game the rules of which are set by another.