Raša Todosijević
Thanks to Raša Todosijević, the grateful poor of the capitalist system

Raša Todosijević, like Marina Abramović and Mladen Stilinović, belongs to a generation of artists who emerged in the early 1970s during a time of political upheaval in Yugoslavia and called for a new critical art practice – “New Art Practice” – that was directed against the political and academic system with actionist and conceptual, but especially ironic strategies. The six-color screen print belongs to the work complex “Gott Liebt die Serben” (God Loves the Serbs), which he began in the late 1980s and which comprises various manifestations: inverted totalitarian symbols that, depending on the context, appeared in drawings and watercolors, sculptures, on copies of art magazine covers, on bottle labels, etc., reacting with sarcasm to the ideology of Serbian nationalism that emerged after Tito – which is exacerbated by the use of the German language. The self-ironic sentence that gives this work its title, on the other hand, appears in Cyrillic in various typographies between abstract-constructivist forms – a reference to the complicity of modernism, nationalism and capitalism.
Text: Eva Scharrer