Prior to the siege of Sarajevo, Edin Numankadić was a painter whose work could be denoted in terms of a continuation of the tradition of abstract gestural painting. The banal fact that there was no paint or canvas available in Sarajevo was not the only reason for his turning away from the autonomous kingdom of Modernism; what was also decisive was that he had become more interested in life itself than in art.
His installation consists of objects taken from his everyday environment. However, these are not ready-mades in the Duchampian sense, but, rather, authentic traces, proofs of a highly condensed time and space. Taken from inside a hyper intensive war situation, they seem as though unable to detach themselves from the life within it. What is interesting, though, is that it is the small paintings, made in Numankadić's abstract style and placed inside the installation, that have changed their meaning to a greater extent than the »non-artistic« objects. In such a context they cease being merely autonomous art entities; they develop into elements tantamount to the everyday objects in this mis-en-scene.
