No More Heroes Any More is a reversed Jeux interdits; namely, the game in it is Obligatory, as in sports or politics. The film is similar to Jeux interdits in that it is not an illustration, but rather a commentary on war, on the theatrics of military mechanics. It suggests that war is a (strategic and tactical) game; that weapons are the toys of adults; that people are toys; that at the end .there is always a force that transforms most ordinary competition into a relentless fight for life - or against it.

And there is an element which places Heroes close to the Ninth Circle, if not right inside it: the backdrop of the video-film by the sculptor Marko Kovacic is predominantly characterized by sets and props, and not by people. The toys are granted souls, while human characters become - or remain or are subjected to - grotesque stereotypes. Stereotypes that are well acquainted with the most important politicians in the world.

Marko Kovacic had previously filmed Declaration of War. At that time there raged a media war, one that seemed to have been almost won. But it's possible that the present war is still the same one. Perhaps it will end only after everything has been destroyed, when there is nothing left to destroy - which is what happened to Babylon, Troy, and Armageddon.

Marko Kovačič creates ambients which conceal a significant cleft somewhere within their structure; they are homely, ordinary, all too familiar, but they nevertheless air a particular, unmistakable discomfort, though its edges are smoothed down with irony and a great deal od tenderness, even love for what is presented to us. "Somewhere within their structure", we said. The exact spot is ellusive and difficult to pin. On the first level, there is the presentation as such: it is less an ambient, strictly speaking, than pieces of ambients, transplanted into the exhibition room(s), displayed, arranged into a kind of niches, incomplete wholes. Marko Kovačič's objects are produced, carefully and in detail. Still, the association to ready-mades is not a coincidence. Kovačič's objects are recycled, and while their "first" context, the one they were first created for (or, say, their "original purpose") still rings in our minds (if we follow Marko Kovačič's work, that is), these (same) objects are ceaselessly rearranged for new presentations and continually create new metaphorical contextual layers.

It is not only Kovačič's objects that are recycled, but also images; objects pass into images (Heroes), images become objects: a set of images at this exhibition are stills from his video Forth Into the Past, and it is through them, perhaps, that we may best experience the world created by Marko Kovačič. The heroes of this video (at least in the present writer's view) are plastoses, animated child dolls and toys which have been, by means of various interventions (fine mechanics? surgery?), transformed into monstruous creatures - yet Kovačič treats them with affection, and justly, because in a way they are more human than humans. British writer of horror Clive Barker comes to mind, with whom one cannot miss his affection for his monsters, regardless of the atrocities they commit - for it is because of their fate that they commit them and not because of a "will for evil".