Can I Rest in Peace?

2022
durational performance
2:00:00-3:00:00

The work is developed in collaboration with Bosnian bio-designer Maja Halilović. Her practice focuses on the invention and application of biomaterials. For this performance, Halilović produced a replica of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dress, originally worn
at President John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration and later re-worn by Kim Kardashian at the 2022 Met Gala, becoming a widely referenced pop-cultural artefact. The dress is fabricated from SCOBY-based material, a form of bacterial cellulose grown through a fermentation process.

In her work, Anastasija Pavić addresses questions that have long preoccupied the human race, such as the creation of life and its extinction. Yet at its core, her work shows how these fundamental concerns often feel insignificant when compared to the societal demand for women to remain eternally beautiful in an era of normalized aesthetic surgery. When it becomes possible to get your lips done at the same place where you wax, the weight and danger behind the pursuit of eternal beauty become fully visible.

Pavić examines how the normalization of risking one’s health in pursuit of an ideal often culminates in compliments like “She ages so elegantly,” “She has no wrinkles at all,” or “She is so slim-thick, like Kim K.” The expectations placed on women have always been high, with centuries of lead poisoning, arsenic, and countless other harmful substances in beauty products worn as a badge of honor. A woman has long been expected to sacrifice her health for the sake of achieving ultimate aesthetic value.

The artist explores how social media has reshaped and intensified these pressures. While the wealthiest can afford the best surgeons, trainers, and estheticians, this fantasy is marketed to the average woman as something she can, and should pursue, sometimes at any cost.

Within this space of hypersexualization, expectation, and denial of the body’s natural aging process lies Can I Rest in Peace, a work that asks the essential question: How important is it to be a beautiful corpse?

– Jovana Trifuljesko, art historian and curator