Geneva Chair for Smiling Faces

This installation was created as a cry of bitterness and revolt against the indolence of so-called “international community” in its reaction to the war in the Balkans, raging in the 90s and destroying the artist’s homeland. Endless series of unproductive meetings, negotiations, “resolutions” and “agreements”, only revealed the brutal reality of global political incompetence. 

“Geneva chair” (armchair, to be more precise) presents those conferences, pompous exercises in futility that always take place in dignified cities. There, in some distinguished edifice, the smiling faces of diplomacy will meet once again, cameras won’t miss their self-confident smiles of optimism, and sit on scenes of atrocity and destruction shown on the monitor placed in the sitting surface of the chair. The scenes of shreds of life in the city of Sarajevo, for years under shelling and sniping, the scenes on the monitor upon which a distinguished gentleman will place his prominence, are accompanied by muted sounds of “The End” of Jim Morrison.

 The installation has been exhibited at the Le Fonderie Gallery in Le Mans (France), the DocumentArt Festival in Newbranderburg (Germany), in Brighton Festival (England),  the Amsterdam Film Museum, the Siswo Institute in Amsterdam and the Royal gallery Genootschap Kunstliefde in Utrecht (the Netherlands).