STAYING ALIVE.

Being an artist on the front line (what an absurd thing) allowed me to maintain a certain equilibrium. I was a third year student at Sarajevo's Academy of Fine Arts when the chaos-war--began. I spent the next four years alternately fighting to defend my city and struggling to make sense of it all with my art. Faced with the threat of death and madness, man often asks what is worse: to go with the current and do like the others, or to remain within one's own four walls. I try to find a balance between these two extremes. Cut off from my family, I was feeling the full weight of solitude. I was cut 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 sense to grasp, in a realistic way, the problems of contemporary creation in the world. Too many changes over those crazy years, too many things got in the way. A lot of my friends ask me what it is that has influenced my wor k over these last few years, and it's very hard to give any real answer. The conditions of my life seem to change every minute, sometimes I feel like some other power is pulling all my strings. Destiny or fate--maybe that's a possible name for the phenomenon.

I never carried out my initial idea for one work, which was to dig trenches in 1994 on 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 one should die for art because, at all events, one was dying for nothing. At the same time, I began to experiment with certain colors: red, green, black and yellow. Each of these colors contains some aspect of the war. I wanted to use these combinations to achieve a certain expression--gradually I reduced it to red and green.

Under the inspiration of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Felix Gondalez-Torres, I began to work with objects that I found around me, but whose ordinary function I changed. By always using the colors red and green, I gave meaning to quite ordinary objects (lighters, clothes pegs, toothbrushes, etc.). My work "The Kiss" (1996), a juxtaposition of two Bic lighters and, of course, a reference 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 green and red--investigations of what can be found between two colors of different emotions, and ordinary things. I wanted to show that one could enhance the poetics of ordinary forms to the highest level of interaction, as in ordinary life. After the war I started to travel around Europe. I began to feel 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 street performance "No Lyrics, No Music, No Country, Nothing..." (1997), my purpose was not to draw from my own experience as a musician. Like a specter I appeared on 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 sound. A bus stopped beside me as I performed and its passengers looked at me curiously through the windows, assuming something was being sung, even though they were not able to hear the sound. Perhaps they thought I was a psychiatric casualty of the war. People passing by would throw their money into the American Emergency Relief Fund can I'd placed in front of me with the label: "Not to be sold or exchanged." This idea of "not to be sold or exchanged" is very clear to the people of ex-Yugoslavia. It's a paradoxical situation, almost a psychological concept 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" presented at MANIFESTA 2 in Luxembourg in 1998, holds a special place. It's a gold plated door handle affixed to a glass bar that was mounted in the middle of a large empty warehouse-type space. Being a young European artist today means being depressed and confused; survival as an artist and recognition by the art world are difficult things to achieve. Giving up their art is a common thing among young artists; getting employed somewhere else for money is their reality. The viewer, when he first sees this golden door handle, sees only possibility. Walking around the object then brings a certain sadness at the realization that, however promising it first appeared, it is impossible to enter anywhere. This golden door handle is a symbol 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 reserved for national flags commemorating official occasions. My flags alluded to the emptiness of the national governments in whose name a bloody war had been waged. These flags disappeared overnight, by order of the newly inaugurated municipal authorities--the first official case of art censorship Sarajevo had seen since the end of the war. My intention was to show 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 property of its citizens. My main imperative in this work was to create a sort of visual decontamination, so necessary to the people of ex-Yugoslavia; and to show the transparency and emptiness that exists in all layers of our social and political life.

The war--perhaps this goes without saying--really affected my life. I had so many problems after it; the only important thing for me to do was find peace and my own identity. I felt torn between my past and my future, between art and politics, between being human and animal, between peace and war. I attempted to address this confusion in my work "Untitled," presented in Sarajevo-Montecarlo in 1998: during the war in 1995 I received a present from an anonymous brigade photographer-a photograph of me dressed for duty as a soldier in the Bosnian army, standing in a trench on the hilltop called Zuc, one of most dangerous front lines surrounding Sarajevo. I didn't even remember the photo being made, and when I got home I put it deep in a drawer, thinking I'd show it one day to my grandchildren if I stayed alive.

Three years after the war ended I happened to be in the south of France, enjoying a few days on the sunny Mediterranean coast. I felt I was there for a reason: to finally connect two ends of a long broken line. One end of that line is visible in the photo of me in Sarajevo during the war; the other is seen in the photo from Montecarlo after the war. Looking at one and then the other in the blink of an eye gives an impression of the non-existence of time and distance, and of the absurdity of going from one situation to another. The gap between these two photographs is the untold story of the film that will never be exposed or the book that will never be written, as well as everything that makes my life as it is today. These photos are documents of me, in two entirely different worlds.

Democracy is the most overused word in the language of contemporary politics. Often hiding behind that word are the most terrible parts of human history. Killings, concentration camps, political violence, governmental sabotage--these are just a few of the "democratic" methods employed to preserve political options of power. The abuse of democracy is something we've become used to, we see examples of it every day on TV, radio and the Internet. We are frequent witnesses to this abuse of power: the creation of instability and war, the flagrant attempts to retain influence and control over a particular region. But what does the word "democracy" actually mean, and how is it possible for us to trust that word anymore? Who are the politicians? How can we trust their faces? How can we tell the difference from one to the next?

In the performance "Champions of Democracy" (2000) I glued photographs of hundreds of recognizable world politicians on the wall--one on top of the other, moving quickly, faces blurring. Finally, when the weight of so many different pictures was too great, it brought the entire pile crashing down. "Champions of Democracy" is an attempt to connect the visually absurd with what exists in our everyday life, by changing the images of politicians just as rapidly as they change on our TV screens, on the pages of our newspapers and magazines, in front of our very eyes. Politicians are interchangeable, in as much as we let them be interchangeable.

These champions of democracy are all politicians--whether good or bad--all self-determined creators of their role in the history of the world. Even Adolf Hitler used the democratic system wisely and was elected by a majority vote. The only force that can bring a politician down is gravity.

The fall of former Yugoslavia effected its republics and provinces in both sociological and cultural layers of life. The many extreme right "democracies" that suddenly appeared needed new iconography and symbols--there was a necessity to remove everything representing the old system, the old society. Names of streets, factories, companies, cars, food, even people's own names; all of it changed almost overnight. In my work "Heroes" (1999) I tried to explain what happens when this phenomenon goes too far. After World War II, the victorious communist party decided to name many factories and companies after various members of the resistance who had lost their lives in the fight against fascism. Almost as soon as the war in ex-Yugoslavia started in 1991, these names began disappearing from the history books, and they were erased from public monuments, because they were believed to be Communists (in many cases they were not). What they couldn't change, however, were the names of many products that were still widel y recognized and continued to be manufactured, even during the war. "Heroes" presents portraits of these heroes alongside examples of the products still carrying their name. What an interesting paradox--that the products that bear these names act as monuments to these "heroes"; that what once existed and was then ripped down is now, once again, reborn.

All my life I've had the feeling someone else is pushing the buttons that decide matters of life and death. Like any other drug, power is everywhere and affects everyone, but it is always removed from the actual activity (someone pushing somebody to do the dirty work for somebody else). "Remote Control" (2000) illustrates how buttons are often pushed the wrong way--happiness, love, hate, economy, trust--against the interest of the majority, by the few who have the power. Because power is removed not only from its source but from its results, it cannot be represented by a human face or an actual person for us to villainize. Power is simply an inanimate plastic object.

NEBOJSA SERIC (SOBA) is a Sarajevo-born artist who currently resides in Amsterdam. Since 1991, his work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe and Scandinavia.