The world of common, found objects and situations is the important context in which numerous projects by Nebojša šerić Shoba are realized. Lucid reinterpretations of the everyday objects confronted to the artist’s intimacy and personal history play with connotations, poetic-politic potentials of the anonymous and the found, only seemingly usual and normal. The research of the socio-landscape of the everyday life also affects various informal interactions and urban practices that reflect daily politics, ideology and economic relationships.
The series of works exhibited in Miroslav Kraljević Gallery is integrated by the experience of the everyday perception of New York, city where Shoba lives and works for the past few years. The unpretentiousness and ease of these works owe its character and origin beyond doubt to the experience of moving about, hanging around and wondering through the city . It seems that this experience is in the first place defined by the desire to break through its attractive membrane. The attempted evocation of the modernist figure of flaneur – the city stroller anchored in the everyday street life who is, according to Walter Benjamin, “botanising on the asphalt”, – in the context of contemporary New York is additionally encumbered with numerous contradictions and anxieties. The city whose identity has been formed on the concept of the ultimate cosmopolitan center is burdend with the pretensions of omnipresent spectacle, consumerism, entertainment, control, moral panic… The crucial task imposed to the contemporary flaneur is the discovery of mental and physical clefts in the city, the accidental cracks in its proud representations. Shoba is trying to convert his own perception of this urban space into some kind of analytic, meaningful-meaningless forms whose marginal and ephemeral details reflect the social context of the city. The works from this exhibition are some kind of ready-made fragments of the everyday , deprived of continuity of their original functions. Hence the photograph “No Time” shows the water bottle used as an improvised, mobile urinal that New York cab drivers use because of the round-the-clock rhythm of their job and the problematic infrastructure…
While the onetime flaneur moved free and unhindered around the city, it seems that today the city institutions use their control mechanisms to supervise and restrict the consummation of time and freedom of movement while structuring their own regulations network. “Blowing Zen” – the video piece showing Times Square, this attractive and dense but also “sterile” city site, with all the passers-by cancelled from the recording – indirectly evokes the supervision of urban dynamics. Once it was precisely the spectacular electrification of Times Square that dramatically restructured urban movement, flows of capital and entertainment and thus strategically cleaned out the then red lights district. The fascinating neon lights of Blowing Zen video have devoured the crowds together with the individuality of the flaneur trying to stand out of the mass. The self-sufficient mechanism of spectacle has virtually become the only, the real protagonist of the city. The view of the emptied Times Square, offered by Shoba’s vision, balances between the stupefying spiritual idyll and ominous atmosphere of the catastrophe films.
The complex and conflict relations of particular objects or commonplaces within the wider symbolic network, in the case of Shoba’s oeuvre are almost always streaked with humor, absurd and irony. Lets remember, for example, the series “Heroes” and “ Battlefields” that were exploring the conflict reception of the historic heritage and detecting their absurd alliance with ideology and capital. Marking the mechanisms of reinterpretation of the history, both projects were realized within the cleft between the past and the actual representations. The National Liberation heroes of the World War Two endure in the collective memory only as the more or less outlived transition brands and the actualizations of both historic and recent battlefields are interpreted by the rhythm of normalization and reconstruction, by the prosperity similar to the impersonal idyll of postcards or by the anesthetized shock of media images. “Battlefields” indirectly also address the repositioning of the places of conflict from the danger zone into the city space which when photographed paradoxically also seems like some anonymous, marginal non-place, even in the case of the presentation of the ground zero in New York. We can also apply such perspective to the city spaces evoked by the works from this exhibition. While observing the lagging flashes of the metamorphosis of an ultimate center into some global, dispersed commonplace, New York is becoming just any given city…
Ana Dević
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To be within network means everything today; adjusting to different cultures is everyday life; elections in the USA are question of life or death; browsing through garbage is fun; Bollywood is industry of dreams; supermarket is gambling hall and philosophers are on strike for a long time already.
These days there is even too much inspiration for art and wherever one looks something is happening. There was never more art in the history of this planet than today and the postmodern concept of life definitively won over (Anything Goes, as they say in gambling jargon).
Henceforth it will be impossible to write a short review of the European, African or Asian art. Dozens of cumbersome biennials, millions of hungry artists in quest for space, hordes of single-minded curators and terrorized gallery owners flooded the planet and, as in one of the final scenes of the movie Perfect Storm, the last and the greatest wave just doesn’t roll over the small boat which is almost endlessly floating by the wave expecting the end to come.
The art industry has inexhaustible resources of energy, material and labor force. The art market devours everything that is produced; only the adequate market has to be found. In this organized chaos the art theory has become superfluous and any critique is a good critique. The art became enormously popular in the moment when the idea became more important than the execution. Getting shut down into one’s studio also became unnecessary. There is nothing that one artist could make by himself. Nobody is an expert in anything and diverse teams solve even the tiniest problems.
The future of the art is substituted for the state of the permanent present.
We are where we are. The ontological circle is broken. The things have to drift faster; television is meditation, bottled water is getting expensive, genetically modified flowers are soon going to broadcast commercials…
Nebojša šerić Shoba
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Nebojša šerić Shoba
Born December in 1968 in Sarajevo.Lives and works in New York.
