Monday, May 05, 2008
Postcard from...Sarajevo
During the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, the inhabitants of the Bosnian capital received thousands of cans of food from the international community. The shipments helped keep the city alive. So it is perhaps not surprising that Bosnian artist Nebojsa Seric Soba would construct a Monument to the International Community in the form of a huge, round tin of canned beef.
But this homage to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art cans of soup, which was erected last year along the river that cuts through Sarajevo, is no simple monument. It doesn’t perform the monument’s conventional function of celebrating the person or object on the pedestal. The cans of food sent to Bosnia were often long past their expiration date. The contents tasted terrible. “It was like pet food, except the dogs and the cats would not even eat it,” says Bosnian curator Dunja Blazevic. Food poisoning was not uncommon.
Read the rest of John Feffer's terrific Postcard from Sarajevo on Foreign Policy in Focus here: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5197
But this homage to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art cans of soup, which was erected last year along the river that cuts through Sarajevo, is no simple monument. It doesn’t perform the monument’s conventional function of celebrating the person or object on the pedestal. The cans of food sent to Bosnia were often long past their expiration date. The contents tasted terrible. “It was like pet food, except the dogs and the cats would not even eat it,” says Bosnian curator Dunja Blazevic. Food poisoning was not uncommon.
Read the rest of John Feffer's terrific Postcard from Sarajevo on Foreign Policy in Focus here: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5197
