A Mirrored Interview
Bojan Stojčić, In-between: Fear of America, Fear for America, 2024. Installation view, RU House, Governors Island, New York.
I met Bojan Stojčić during a guest crit session at Residency Unlimited. The fastly emerging artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina grew up in the shadows of the Bosnian War, which ended in 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Agreement. The more I speak with him, the more I am made aware of the stark difference between being displaced as a participant (Bojan) and the ability to empathize with displacement as an outsider (myself). Art, on the other hand, acting as a border that doesn’t require showing a passport, seems to be the most effective medium that enables a cross-over. Bojan’s methodologies in conceptual art under the dome of political activism, or inactivism if you may, breathe fresh air into contemporary social commentary which is increasingly undermining art as its means of expression.
As a critique of the traditional interview process, Bojan and I conducted a “mirrored interview” for IMPULSE Magazine: instead of me asking him questions, he would ask me questions about his works.
Bojan Stojčić: My work in the last ten years revolves around the notions of presence, participation, belonging, and the opposites of those terms. I was always more interested in the small things or moments hidden in the everyday. That is where I find my agency to take back my subjectivity that was once displaced. Do you think our bodies, once put in new political frameworks, become some sort of mirrors where the gaze taken can meet the gaze given?
Phil Zheng Cai: I absolutely do, and I've always believed that in contemporary art, stories need to be brought out by sensibilities. Rhetorics might deviate from border to border, community to community, but sensibilities, when transferred into an artistic language, are always more global and humanitarian. Perhaps it's a personal preference, but I tend to appreciate art that intrigues the senses to begin with. Once you are intrigued and decide to enter, the intricacies of cultural backgrounds, political stories, and personal anecdotes will automatically fill themselves in naturally. Stories should be introduced and reflected rather than forced.
Take your recent work, In-between: Fear of America, Fear for America, for example. You placed two mirrors, facing each other, in a room on Governors Island, one saying “Fear for America” and the other saying “Fear of America.” With this installation, you metaphorically created a third “mirror,” arguably in between the two where the gaze taken meets the gaze given. We are simultaneously inside and outside the “American” rhetorics, being a mirror while looking into a mirror. The infinite mirror effect also hints at the paradox of American politics between looking from the outside and inspecting from within. Nonetheless, what I love the most about this work is the fact that I can somehow sense the alien status of the artist. You did a masterful job “hiding” while emitting just enough senses and cues to tell a story that is reflected rather than told.
Bojan Stojčić, 36 Proposals for a Public Monument, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
BS: What happens in the US surely affects the rest of the world. I started writing you this email on Inauguration Day, but I could not finish it. Not because I lack words in my broken English, but because political realities both inside and outside the US are changing in front of our eyes. Two years ago, I made a series of proposals for public monuments, all lasting until the first blow of the wind. At what point do you think the present moment becomes history? Once it passes, or once it affects us?
PZC: To reference Heidegger, the past is constantly simultaneously in front of and behind our eyes as we are “tossed” in time. It is indeed a sad time of a “global right turn.” But with an understanding that either direction would ultimately swing back, we shouldn't overlook the temporality of any momentum, positive or negative. Being temporary is the only permanent status quo. The juxtaposition of timeliness against ephemerality might be the most romantic dichotomy in human history. The things that are considered eternal are usually strongly associated with something else that is very momentary. There has been art made focusing on fleeting moments, but your Public Monuments series is a rare body of work that seems to enact the powerlessness inherent to each individual in society, being “tossed.”
Your choice of casual mediums (plastic forks, nuts, flower pedals, etc.) re-introduced mundaneness into art-making, which seems to have been missed in a world focusing on transcending over descending. Against Duchamp’s “ready-mades,” your temporal sculptures exhibit a maximum effort to be “made,” but never fully assembled and don’t allow any chance to be, by definition, actually “made.” They are “nearly-mades.” This body of work exhibits the most formal integrity by the definition of fine art while using mediums that simply cannot be considered “art mediums.” This internal tear is quite passive. Instead of making a statement with sculptures, you are being forced into a statement. Perhaps I might attribute this character of your work to your background within a politically torn country in Bosnia and Herzegovina because the breakup of Yugoslavia, from a civilian’s perspective, is passively enforced.
Bojan Stojčić, Peace Hotel Phantom, 2023. Installation view, Ivano-Frankivsk National Theatre, Ukraine. Photo by Sasha Kovalenko.
BS: You are absolutely right. The permanent temporarity of Bosnian reality is what inspires my practice in general. The country is stuck in a never-ending transition with the Dayton Peace Agreement as its constitution creates circumstances both impossible and unchangeable at the same time. I would say most of my works are just ways of recognizing and marking these circumstances. That is why I needed to go to Dayton, Ohio, a few years back, to visit the place of peace negotiations that gave shape to my country today. Once I found myself there, the only guest in an empty hotel within the biggest military air force base, I realized what I truly am—a phantom roaming in an obsolete structure. Maybe the difference between the eternal and the momentary is our ability to change it?
PZC: Or perhaps our inability to change either. I interpret Hope Hotel Phantom as an extension of your 36 Proposals for a Public Monument, except this time you were not the constructor of these seemingly impenetrable structures. Like public monuments, peace is always over-promised. You being in the nearly-deserted Dayton Hotel, re-living the peace negotiations is like standing in shock at the previous sites where your Public Monuments had once taken place, mourning the fact that the once stable structures—hope for permanent peace—are already gone with the wind. The inevitable fall of your public sculptures has almost no consequence, but the Dayton Agreement bore the ultimate consequences of deciding a country's destiny. The fact that these two situations feel eerily similar is ironic and alarming.
Historical events will become only retrievable in historical books for those without the physical experiences. This marks your action of chasing the specters of Dayton Peace Hotel valid because it seems to be the only way to transform regional sorrow into global awareness, and project the stories of a selective community onto a shared memory.
This now brings another topic of how borders (both physical and cultural) inhibit shared memories and understandings, a defining characteristic of being misplaced and displaced. I understand you have tried to comment on the action of “crossing?”
Bojan Stojčić, 402 kilometers: Objects in the mirror, 2023. Photo documentation of performance. Photo by Šimun Bučan.
BS: Sometimes borders cross you. In my performance 400 kilometers: Objects in the mirror, I crossed the border that once crossed me. In a simple act of driving from my hometown Sarajevo (capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina) to my show opening in Zagreb (capital of Croatia), there were so many underlying meanings to it. Both Sarajevo and Zagreb were part of the former Yugoslavia, a country that collapsed in the '90s.
Today, Croatia is part of the European Union, Schengen Area, and what is considered the “Western world.” Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Dayton-shaped reality, is usually marked on the maps as part of the Global South (a small island of the Global South within Europe). Therefore, my drive from town to town was also crossing two realities. Of course, as I was entering the so-called Western world, I spent time in lines on the border. In that particular performance, I had to wait for forty minutes at the border—that is how late I arrived at my show in Zagreb where the visitors were waiting for me. Once I arrived, I parked my car and that was the end of the show. I transferred my waiting to them: the piece lasted forty minutes. Historically speaking, Bosnia and Herzegovina was always on the outskirts of the empire, so wait long enough and some borders will eventually cross you. Maybe that is what shapes my practice—moments displaced, misplaced. Maybe time spent waiting is a time of possibilities?
PZC: This is my favorite piece of yours, and I once again attribute it to the capturing of “passiveness.” Your delay at the border and the audience’s waiting are both passive activities. In this performance, the performer's action was overshadowed by the non-action or inability of action.
In the US, contemporary political art has a strong connotation of activeness. We notice a problem, immediately act on it, try to voice it to the loudest degree possible, and continue by either voicing our needs even louder because we are unhappy with the results, or start again from the beginning of this loop. Perhaps I am drawn to your 400 kilometers: Objects in the mirror because it is a passive protest, a consequence-triggered action rather than a demand-making one.
This work reminds me of Alighiero Boetti's “Mappa” series where he invited Afghan and Pakistani artists to create time-consuming handwoven textile maps of the world with the understanding that by the time they finished each map, the borders would have already changed. You share a similar sensibility of passiveness with Boetti, commenting, acknowledging, and observing our inability to make a difference.
Bojan Stojčić, In-between: Fear of America, Fear for America, 2024. Installation view, RU House, Governors Island, New York.
BS: Being passive or static in moments of turmoil has its own potential. Maybe that is my way of taking my agency back, no matter how gestual. I would say my practice is not trying to be reactive, but active in recognizing its own circumstances for better or worse. Like our conversation; you are interviewing me, but in the end, I am the one with all the questions. Our positions of power got completely mixed up in the process. In the reality of deliberate dispositions of our everyday life, maybe confusion can be disruptive?
PZC: As I was formulating how to answer this inquisitive question, Google’s AI beat me to a short response. It proposed the options of selecting between “I agree with you,” “Good points,” and “I understand.” Not to my surprise, all three are affirmative answers. This precisely enacts what you and I have been going against: In the reality of deliberate dispositions of our everyday life, maybe most exchanges are too affirmative, without any confusion.
We have to understand that challenging a position and challenging a system are two completely different things. Political art, given the nature of seeking changes based on live events, usually falls victim to only challenging a position rather than questioning the logic of a system. Systematic critique is rare and lacking in contemporary art. Confusion is perhaps the best antidote to systematic affirmation. This is true to your work, our conversation, and the exact format of a “mirrored interview.”
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
