Blending personal and cultural mythologies, Rakovic (b. 2000) explores the grey lived experience between memory, history, fact, and subjectivity. By combining the visual lexicon of their youth spent surfing Tumblr, Youtube, and Deviantart with the faraway stories from their refugee family, Rakovic encapsulates the strange, dislocated experience of living as a second-generation immigrant from Yugoslavia, a country which no longer exists.

As the inherited grief for this nation haunts them like a phantom, Rakovic’s imagery harnesses the absurd and the kitsch in an attempt to grapple with displacement, loss, and homesickness with no home.

Under the comfortable immateriality of the web, Rakovic found a new home, shaping the colourful, chaotic, and patchworked visual language of their work.

Rakovic sees themself as a conduit for the imagery and stories they encounter online, a weaver of new mythologies built from mundane threads. Inspired by the ethos of the OG net art movement, they harness the hyper-saturated and pastiched iconography, which follows us doggedly on-and-off-line.

They have a fascination with ambiguity in absence, revelling in painting’s ability to evoke without explanation. Holding a degree in English Literature and a background in marketing, they love stories in all shapes and forms – and invite viewers to use their works as a mirror for their own interpretation.