Miniatures, 2003
The video projection Miniatures, 2003 shows the unedited footage created when the artist took a morning drive through Seine Sainte Denise, a multicultural working-class suburb of Paris. We see the nondescript architecture of economic rationalism: housing estates, shops and a football stadium. Unnerved, the artist lets the windscreen cloud over as he drives. Then he draws lines in the fog on the pane with his index finger, apparently tracing at least in part the fragmented contours of buildings and infrastructures. While the title of the work Miniatures apparently refers to the Christian tradition of manuscripts decorated with letters and images, the lines the artist draws across the glass have also been compared with the square interlocking ornaments of Islamic Kufic calligraphy. When Šarčević turns on the ventilator, the composition evaporates within seconds, and the film ends.

Working Surface I, 2004
The sculpture Working Surface I, 2004 consists of a black granite slab mounted on a steel frame like a bench. Covered with a maze of lines and circles, the slab, as art critic Jennifer Allen noted, is the miner’s version of a butcher’s block. Certain chunks of granite destined for construction were cut on the slab for many years. In both works, different time scales are superimposed on each other – here the traces of work, there those of caprice, here a sense of permanence, there of transience.

Text: Dominic Eichler, from the publication “Junger Ankauf”, Cologne 2012