Do Not Lose Your Hope is an improvised raft (roughly 100 cm by 1000 cm), made of lifeboat-orange plastic sewer pipes, with a sail/ flag, carrying signs both of Red Cross and Red Crescent, and the inscription in Arabic reading - “Do Not Lose Your Hope”, hoisted up its mast. Other four red crosses are painted on the raft. From a distance, the raft looks like a marker buoy, but as you approach closer, you realize that what is standing in front of you is in fact the artist’s rendition of the lifeboat intended for saving refugees forced by dire need to set out on the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. What is perhaps not instantly comprehended by the viewer is that Hraste, in opening up the discursive field of difficult social, political and religious issues, and humane concerns, is both ambiguous and wonderfully direct when it comes to the hot issue of migrations. Davorka Perić writes: “By smartly manipulating antagonistic symbols and scripts, exploiting social textuality and the performative potential of metaphor exemplified by Marie-Antoniette’s infamous sentence: ‘Let them eat cake’ (Fr. ’qu’ils mangent de la brioche’), he weaves the narrative of incomprehension of ‘another else’, using the language of sculpture” (from the catalogue of Another Else/ Drugi drugi exhibition, held at Zlarin, April 23, 2016). This installation has been made in two versions, to accommodate two different venues. Do Not Lose Hope 1 was launched and left adrift at sea, during a group exhibition that put a spotlight on the environment and its larger social contexts. Its cargo was an enlarged cake made of Styrofoam, painted in pink, and decorated with cake decorations.
With Do Not Lose Hope 2 the author responded once more to the context. The AŽ Gallery, in which the raft was to be exhibited, was located inside the former elementary school long ago converted into work spaces for artists. Inspired by the lively artistic environment of the Žitnjak studios, Hraste opted for co-shared authorship, by inviting his hosts to load the raft with their own works. The project brought together about fifteen authors using different forms of expression. Suspended in the air, about thirty centimetres above the floor, and placed in otherwise empty gallery space, the raft looked like a floating monument of good will that invited the viewer to imagine it sailing in the sea and eventually turning into an insignificant dot, in the same way in which the artist’s message to the public will soon be lost in the flood of real-life messages of a much more dangerous kind. It goes without saying that the refuges would choose food and clothes over works of art, but for the artist the raft’s cargo has a larger meaning. He sees it as an opportunity to express, in a symbolic way, the frustration with his own inability to offer meaningful help to those who are in need, as well as a chance to question the role and purpose of art making in current life circumstances. “It must be said right at the beginning that it was far from Hraste’s intention to disparage all the individual and systematic efforts that have been taken so far in helping refugees around the world. Hraste does not announce the redundancy of art, either. He simply expresses his wish to give what he has, when he can not give what is needed. There is, however, a sting of criticism in his work on the account on those works of art that address or challenge the refugee crisis in the activist manner. Such works may bring their authors credit for empathy or add a ‘noble cause’ record on their artist CVs, but they do not resolve the problem, either. Hraste’s work does not mock our urge to respond, or the ‘positive shock’ that makes us brutally aware that something unpleasant is actually happening. It only criticises self-contentment of certain ‘engaged’ artists who ascribe to their work importance on account of their activism. When elevated to universal level, this irony becomes the caricature of a kind of blindness, or rather, of a trend among certain artists who claim that their work is crucial for the future of mankind, or even for saving planet Earth. Fortunately, there are still also the artists who know that their work will not save the world – and one of them is Hraste – , but who never stop trying, grouped under the motto of James Joyce that “one should always stay faithful to the battles lost in advance” From: Greiner, Boris. 2016. Osvojena područja, Vol. 4. Zagreb: Petikat
