Being an artist forward the front line (what an absurd thing) allowed me to maintain a certain equilibrium.

Being an artist forward the front line (what an absurd thing) allowed me to maintain a certain equilibrium. I was a third year close examiner at Sarajevo's Academy of Fine Arts when the chaos-war--began. I worn out the next four years alternately fighting to uphold my city and struggling to make sensation of it all with my art. Faced with the threat of death and madness, man repeatedly asks what is worse: to pass with the current and do like the others, or to remain within one's allow four walls. I try to find a balance between these couple extremes. Cut off from my family, I was feeling the filled weight of solitude. I was carve off from my own emotions, which influenced my observations as a painter and sculptor. I maintained contact with the "outside world" in a rather absurd and random kind of way, which helped me in a reason to grasp, in a realistic way, the question s of contemporary creation in the world. Too many changes athwart those crazy years, too many things got in the way. A chance of my friends ask me what it is that has influenced my wor k through the whole extent of these last few years, and it's exceedingly hard to give any real answer. The conditions of my life be seen to change every minute, sometimes I be warmed like some other power is pulling all my strings. Destiny or fate--maybe that's a possible name for the phenomenon.

I none carried out my initial idea for common work, which was to dig trenches in 1994 forward the front line where I happened to be, as in the shape of Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) and which would have established a direct confrontation between art and war, between the "law" of art and the "law" of war. It would have raised the question of whether single in kind should die for art because, at all occurrences one was dying for nothing. At the same time, I began to experiment with certain colors: r verdant black and yellow. Each of these colors contains a certain quantity of aspect of the war. I wanted to use these combinations to achieve a certain expression--gradually I reduc it to r and green

subordinate to the inspiration of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Felix Gondalez-Torres, I began to work with things that I found around me on the other hand whose ordinary function I changed. by dint of always using the colors r and recent I gave meaning to quite ordinary marks (lighters, clothes pegs, toothbrushes, etc) My work "The Kiss" (1996) a juxtaposition of pair Bic lighters and, of course, a regard to Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancussi, was created for the Biennale for Young Artists in Rijeka, Croatia and was awarded first prize. The piece constitutes a link in my ongoing series of experiments with recent and red--investigations of what can be construct between two colors of different emotions, and ordinary things. I wanted to present to view that one could enhance the poetics of ordinary forms to the highest horizontal of interaction, as in ordinary life. After the war I started to travel around Europe I began to be perceived more and more free the further away I got from that vast psychiatric laboratory, Sarajevo. I started working with v ideos, performances, etc

In my road performance "No Lyrics, No Music, No land Nothing..." (1997), my purpose was not to draw from my confess experience as a musician. Like a specter I appeared onward the streets of Ljubljana and Sarajevo, wearing a sign around my neck bearing no inscription, holding a guitar without strings and "singing" without making a unbroken A bus stopped beside me as I performed and its passengers gazeed at me curiously through the windows, assuming something was being sung unruffled though they were not able to hear the entire Perhaps they thought I was a psychiatric casualty of the war. the public passing by would throw their currency into the American Emergency Relief permanent fund can I'd placed in assurance of me with the label: "Not to be sold or exchanged." This idea of "not to be sold or exchanged" is real clear to the people of ex-Yugoslavia. It's a paradoxical situation, almost a psychological general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of isolation and loss, in the divergent economic and political interests in the Yugoslavian war where human life, as well as the Bosnian state, were bought and sold

Among all the work I've done in the last three years, my piece "Untitled" not absented at MANIFESTA 2 in Luxembourg in 1998 clinchs a special place. It's a gold plated door handle affixed to a glass bar that was ariseed in the middle of a large devoid of contents warehouse-type space. Being a young European artist today means being abaseed and confused; survival as an artist and recognition by dint of the art world are difficult things to achieve. Giving up their art is a universal thing among young artists; getting give employment toed somewhere else for money is their reality. The viewer, when he first papal courts this golden door handle, descrys only possibility. Walking around the percept then brings a certain sadness at the realization that, however promising it first appeared, it is impossible to inscribe anywhere. This golden door handle is a representative of something you cannot reach.

I made another piece in 1998 titled "Under all those flags." I attached dozens of rectangular "flags" of transparent plastic onto the lampposts lining the banks of the river Miljacka in Sarajevo--lampposts normally reserv for national flags commemorating official occasions. My flags alluded to the emptiness of the national restraints in whose name a sanguinary war had been waged. These flags disappeared overnight, by way of order of the newly inaugurated municipal authorities--the first official case of art censorship Sarajevo had seen since the extremity of the war. My intention was to point out to how symbols blind us to reality. It is not surprising that the politicians controlling our public spaces can forget that the city is the collective ownership of its citizens. My main imperative in this work was to create a sort of visual decontamination, in such a manner necessary to the people of ex-Yugoslavia; and to display the transparency and emptiness that exists in all layers of our social and political life.