Šerić-Šoba

Nebojša Šerić-Šoba
Tragedy, 1999
photograph

One of the basic artistic strategies of Nebojša Šerić-Šoba seems to be to bring together elements from very different contexts and find surprising parallelism and connections between them. One of the best-known examples of such an approach is a diptych of two photographs of the artist himself. One of them shows him in uniform and armed in the trenches during the Bosnian war; in the other, he is standing in the same posture near the sea in the relaxed atmosphere of some Adriatic coastal town.

The work Tragedy, made for Šoba's show at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana in 1999, combines the imagery of contemporary mass culture and the high tradition of Classical sculpture. The picture shows a football player from a small-town, provincial club, in total despair after his team has been defeated. His posture is immediately recognizable as the posture of the Dying Gaul. This sculpture is not only a representation of a dying soldier; the Gaul is, above all, a personification of the bitterness and despair of defeat. In the overall context of the celebration of Roman victories, the sculptor of the Dying Gaul succeeded in imbuing this image of despair and defeat with a particular moral dignity. The parallelism of this sculpture and the football-player is more than just a witty idea. Journalists often use the word "tragedy" in describing a badly defeated team. As Šoba shows in his work, such descriptions should be taken literally. Because of the emotional and symbolic investment in the battles of contemporary sports, a defeat can be a very real tragedy for a team and its fans.

Igor Zabel

(from the catalogue The Art of Eastern Europe. A Selection of Works for the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Innsbruck, 2001)