Hope Hotel Phantom
In November 1995, the leaders of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia & Serbia met in Dayton (Ohio) to broker a peace agreement that would end four violent years of war in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Negotiated at the Hope Hotel located on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Dayton Agreement locked Bosnia & Herzegovina into a simulacra of democracy, through the proxy of a site that was a simulacra in itself: a military base on the other side of the world, an intimidation to the signing parties.
27 years later, in July 2022, I flew to America from Bosnia & Herzegovina and booked myself a room at the Hope Hotel. There, I filled the same beds & conference halls as the people who had once shaped my future — a phantom in the echoes of this historical event: a dream turned nightmare.
36 Proposals for a Public Monument
Couple of months I dedicated to long walks and ephemeral sculptures I was making out of the trash I would find on the streets of Berlin.
Very soon it was clear to me that the shapes I was making did not come out of nowhere – they were echoes of the shapes imprinted in both my memory and my history, Monuments of Peoples Liberation Struggle.
History to the Stone, Future to the Wind
History to the stone, future to the wind is a series of performances on three specific sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Partisan Air Squadron Memorial at Medeno Polje, Partisan Cemetery in Mostar and Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo. Dressed in an officer’s coat, trying to fill the space around him with my breath, I am blowing white balloons, tying them to myself, thereby taking a form of an apparition, a wraith.
With this manoeuvre, I present the confinement between the past and the future that I feel as a member and observer of the history which rejects itself, history of my own family, and myself. At the same time, I breathe life into the space, thus communicating exactly what this spatio-temporal instance is rejecting.
Viva la Transicion!
Always insisting on establishing natural communication between space and subject, I decided that my art piece would be the tram itself. The tram I was given for the intervention was a modified ČKD Model Tatra K2YU, produced in Prague in 1977 – a model specifically designed for Sarajevo on the basis of Eastern Europe’s favourite K2 tram. Although the ČKD factory followed the usual privatisation storyline, and is no longer operational, its trams are still in use in some countries. The very idea that one of the last newly-introduced Sarajevan trams was bought by a state which no longer exists from a state which no longer exists was of substantial artistic value to me.
This work became a personal credo, which I revisit often in different forms and formats.
Bujrum, Bujrum, Bujrum, Bujrum!
During my artist residency in Palermo, I felt home in the multilayered Sicilian language, which has been shaped by centuries of foreign occupation and influence, like my own. As I was learning ceramics from local craftsmen there, shapes I was baking were shapes of different tongues.
Months later, I smuggled the sculptures back home, then again into the EU, where I did a public performance in the town of Koprivnica, Croatia. Provided the table and scales on local market, I was weighing and selling tongues for the price of meat, discussing post-Yugoslav politics of language with customers and fellow salesmen.
Seeking for a Person
An oversized ad covering the facade of the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the latest displays of my ongoing performance and installation „Seeking for a Person“. The ad reads „Young man (31) from Sarajevo, seeks a person to discuss art with“, in BHS and English language, with my personal phone number attached to it. The Gallery is only one of the places where this ad appeared:
over time, I have been posting it in the ad sections of various daily newspapers or specialised ad papers throughout the region, as well as in the exhibiting spaces in Bosnia, Serbia and France. This intervention in public space conveys the basic communicative function of art itself, as well as one of the basic characteristics of a civic, democratic society.
With this ad, in addition, I position myself as a citizen, an artist, and a human within an environment in which such categories are frequently met with misunderstanding, rejection or reduction. The ad subverts and questions the possible (non)existence of those categories in our nearest surroundings.