second chance or WOMAN WITH MOKA COFFEE HAIR

SECOND CHANCE
Artist Aleksandar Rakezić, in the project titled 'Second Chance,' problematizes and criticizes the practices of the cosmetic industry and mass media that have been promoting an idealized vision of the human body and lifestyle for decades. Beauty and its standards have taken various forms and interpretations throughout history, while the transience of the human body and death as a concept have often been explored in various artistic spheres.

The series of twelve objects represents a mimetic reproduction of hair dye box editions named Popart. Each of the boxes is manually painted to oppose fast and mechanical production. The artist employs a traditional painting approach to reinterpret a motif devoid of any artistic value (hair dye) as an object with an aura. The audience is invited to analyze each segment of the exhibited objects in detail, to walk around them, and pay attention to the technical execution of the motif. Rakezić creates a hybrid atmosphere where paradox prevails.

Objects that we do not attach importance to in our daily activities, but serve only as mere packaging on which content attractive to the human eye is reproduced and adapted for marketing to attract attention, now have a focal point, and the artist "forces" us to analyze and face the reality of our own environment. Beautiful faces from advertisements and products become the embodiment of the capitalist system and industries whose goal is solely to increase capital, which they achieve by manipulating people's fear of aging and death and promoting unhealthy patterns such as preserving eternal youth and beauty. In his current practice, Aleksandar Rakezić dealt with the topics of mass media in their influence on the contemporary social order, the concept of idealization, the questioning of the terms artistic and non-artistic image, as well as the phenomenon of the image and its variations and transformations throughout history.

A WOMAN WITH MOCHA COFFEE HAIR
Thinking about hair and death

It's been a couple of years since I realized, during regular chats with my mother, that she has come to terms with the fact that her hair is graying more and more quickly. She had said something like, it's not worth it, now I'm getting more and more gray hair, that's how you do it. Isolated from that moment, but certainly still under the auspices of the same roof of the house where I was born and where I have been coming as a guest for more than a decade, while I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I watched a box of hair dye for a long time as if in a reel shot. The brand was called Gloss, and the edition was called POPART. What attracted me the most was the gold drop shown on the box. That drop looked both perverse and holy at the same time. The woman on the front of the packaging was a brunette, her hair color tone was called mocha coffee, and that was the color my mother dyed her hair. No matter how engrossed I was in that scene and that box of hair dye as an intruder among other things in the bathroom, I didn't connect enough with that image in order to engage in the problematization of its reproduction.

A year later, however, when I came to the same place, I felt that I was connected to that object. It was as if I had become accustomed to the sight of a woman with hair the color of mocha coffee. That's how the Second Chance cycle began, which I worked on during my four-month stay in Cetinje.
With great awareness that hair dyes are not only used to cover gray hair but also, just for fashion, to change hair colors, I still direct all my aspirations towards the more baroque context of the aforementioned cosmetic product. Through many of my works, it can be established that I deal more with the passage of time than with the theme of identity. Transience, attention and fragility of objects and images around us are also manifested through series of objects, images and installations in
to my artistic practice. The first objects I made were made of plaster, I painted them to look like boxes of sage, dates, candies, etc. but they were very brittle and fragile and would be easily damaged. On those first objects, time and space scratched the illusion that I patiently painted and thus imposed themselves as the two winners in this match. The new objects are made of acrylic resin, a synthetic material that is much more resistant than plaster, which makes this series of illusions more successful because the passage of time and changes in space can do little to it. All this is told because I started from almost thinking about rubble, construction waste, as a surplus that is devoid of potential (read life) and thus represents a kind of dead spot. It remains as an unusable product created by building systems and constructions for living. The rubble created by the construction of the building is just a postcard from the future that shows what that building will look like one day after time crushes it. If we were to compare the porosity of building materials with the fragility of human hair, then we would interpret hair dye as a means of reparation or repair of signs of deterioration. Hence, these two factors are the key material carriers of the exhibition.
The immaterial factor that transforms the setting into an ambience are the voice messages, which are notes of an interview made with a famous hairdresser - Stevan Rules. Stevan was asked questions related to the wider and narrower context in which the motif of hair dye can be viewed. The person speaking is not physically present, but his voice, thoughts, experiences permeate the environment and, like a nervous system, animates the physical parts of the exhibition into an eerie whole.
The exhibition Second Chance or Woman with hair the color of mocha coffee is a hybrid construction that uses the potential of building elements, personal experiences and mimesis to talk about man's attempt to reconcile himself with transience through aestheticization.