Modern Prayers: Eren Saračević’s Liturgy for the Digital Age

In Modern Prayers, multimedia artist Eren Saračević crafts a powerful meditation on the rituals, relics, and reverence of our hyperconnected world. This body of work—comprising five interlinked components: a photographic video, sculptural tablets, wearable vestments, an interactive device, and a spoken-word homily—blurs the lines between sacred ceremony and digital compulsion. At its core, the project poses a bold proposition: that we are no longer merely users of technology—we are its worshippers.

Saračević names this condition technotheism: a shift in the spiritual arc of civilization. If polytheism mirrored nature and monotheism projected man onto the divine, then technotheism worships what we ourselves have built. Our phones become relics; notifications, liturgies; posts, offerings. The divine is no longer unreachable. It is tactile, portable, and constantly updated.

But Modern Prayers is not satire. It resists easy irony. Instead, it constructs a liturgy of fractured faith—a reverent, if unsettling, portrait of belief in a secular era. In Saračević’s hands, scrolling becomes an act of devotion, tapping a screen echoes the ritualism of prayer beads, and wearable tech mimics priestly vestments. These objects, so embedded in our lives, are reframed not as tools but as symbols in a new, digital theology.

This project is a continuation of Saračević’s ongoing inquiry into the relationship between symbolism, identity, and the fragile scaffolding of collective memory. Born in Sarajevo (1987), Menorca (1992), and Barcelona (2005)—a poetic chronology rather than a literal one—his practice is steeped in metaphor. He has previously turned flags into birds, nations into torn books, and phones into prayers. His aesthetic voice is both tender and incisive: a rare balance of irony and melancholy that invites introspection rather than shock.

What unites all his works, including Modern Prayers, is not simply visual coherence but a deeper philosophical thread. Saračević is less concerned with creating "content" and more invested in building meaning. His work unfolds slowly. It refuses virality. In an era of immediacy, that resistance becomes its own form of critique—a soft but persistent challenge to the pace of our digital lives.

Modern Prayers does not ask whether we still believe—it assumes we do. The question it raises is far more urgent: what do our new gods look like, and what do they say about us?

Modern Prayers: Eren Saračević’s Liturgy for the Digital Age

In Modern Prayers, multimedia artist Eren Saračević crafts a powerful meditation on the rituals, relics, and reverence of our hyperconnected world. This body of work—comprising five interlinked components: a photographic video, sculptural tablets, wearable vestments, an interactive device, and a spoken-word homily—blurs the lines between sacred ceremony and digital compulsion. At its core, the project poses a bold proposition: that we are no longer merely users of technology—we are its worshippers.

Saračević names this condition technotheism: a shift in the spiritual arc of civilization. If polytheism mirrored nature and monotheism projected man onto the divine, then technotheism worships what we ourselves have built. Our phones become relics; notifications, liturgies; posts, offerings. The divine is no longer unreachable. It is tactile, portable, and constantly updated.

But Modern Prayers is not satire. It resists easy irony. Instead, it constructs a liturgy of fractured faith—a reverent, if unsettling, portrait of belief in a secular era. In Saračević’s hands, scrolling becomes an act of devotion, tapping a screen echoes the ritualism of prayer beads, and wearable tech mimics priestly vestments. These objects, so embedded in our lives, are reframed not as tools but as symbols in a new, digital theology.

This project is a continuation of Saračević’s ongoing inquiry into the relationship between symbolism, identity, and the fragile scaffolding of collective memory. Born in Sarajevo (1987), Menorca (1992), and Barcelona (2005)—a poetic chronology rather than a literal one—his practice is steeped in metaphor. He has previously turned flags into birds, nations into torn books, and phones into prayers. His aesthetic voice is both tender and incisive: a rare balance of irony and melancholy that invites introspection rather than shock.

What unites all his works, including Modern Prayers, is not simply visual coherence but a deeper philosophical thread. Saračević is less concerned with creating "content" and more invested in building meaning. His work unfolds slowly. It refuses virality. In an era of immediacy, that resistance becomes its own form of critique—a soft but persistent challenge to the pace of our digital lives.

Modern Prayers does not ask whether we still believe—it assumes we do. The question it raises is far more urgent: what do our new gods look like, and what do they say about us?