When I Grow Up, I Will Be in Bronze

The consumerist society of the 20th and 21st century has shaped the average person into a consumer. In a time when objects cease to be merely useful, their surface becomes a mirror of our desires, status, and identity. What we buy and keep carries within it far more than function, it embodies signs we interpret, codes of belonging, and materialized illusions of permanence. The symbolic value often overshadows the essence of the object, while the market shapes our perception of what is deemed “valuable” and “worthless.” The exhibition departs precisely from this discrepancy. With the very choice of title, When I Grow Up, I Will Be in Bronze, the artist opens a space for introspective reflection: what does it mean to grow and be shaped in a world where value is measured through accumulation, through the ability of objects to confirm status or identity? Zorana Stevanović directs attention to what at first glance appears modest and weightless, and through the process of artistic transformation introduces it into a narrative in which the material becomes a bearer of emotional, social, and aesthetic layers of meaning. Personal objects thus cross from the private sphere into the public space of the exhibition, thereby acquiring a new form of perception.

While sculptures, assemblages, and video works shape a dialogue between the material and the symbolic, inventories of objects, seemingly cold and neutral tables, grow into archives of value. The classification of personal belongings according to institutional, collector’s, and intimate criteria reveals that no system of evaluation is truly objective. What seems like neutral record-keeping in fact shows how society acknowledges, the market rewards, and the individual emotionally attaches, three paradigms that shape our perception and system of values. In this way, the exhibition positions itself as a meditation on capital, consumption, and art. Zorana Stevanović’s works question the mechanisms of valuation in a society where money too often determines the worth of everything, including the artwork itself. At the same time, they open a space for alternative ways of thinking, offering an environment in which art refuses the logic of the market and instead stands as resistance and alternative, a place where an ordinary object dreams of bronze, and bronze becomes a metaphor for the human longing for eternal duration.

Maša Obradović
Belgrade, September 2025