Maja Bajevic

"The long green golden grass looks like the hair of a girl. I help her in brushing.. this makes me think of a dream, reminds me the time when everything was going well…” (about the installation “Green green grass of home")

Eight months. With this idea Maja Bajevic leaves her country to spend a period for studying abroad. Eight years. The time Maja will wait to be able to come back in the ex-Yugoslavia.

When you live in a condition of war, boundaries, identities, believes and form crumble, overwhelmed by the events, and what was just before a richness, as diversity, may become cause of persecution.
Maja Bajevic lived this experience in her full artistic maturity, and, probably because of the lucidity caused by the forced separation from her land in war, has been able to communicate some of the most difficult contemporary matters with a delicate style, just as she is.

Maja Bajevic was born in Sarajevo (in 1967) and here lives when the town represents an example of cohabitation and inter-ethnic confrontation, famous for the many cultures, religions and ethnics.
In 1989 the artist moves into Paris (with a scholarship of the French government) and during her stay the occupation of Sarajevo prevent her to come back to her town. She finished therefore her post-graduated studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and when she graduates her work is already mature and well defined.
Suspended between a country which was not her own and a home she cannot come back to, Maja feels like a refugee – even if of a fatherland that doesn’t exist anymore – and day by day she elaborates some of the thoughts which will represent the heart of her artistic research. At her return in Sarajevo, many years later, Maja will find a very different town from the one she left, a town where diversity is not a value but an obstacle, and where religious intolerance and nationalism took the place of pluralism and co-habitation.
The artistic life, in the ex-Yugoslavia by the end of  the years nineties, is slowly waking up from the torpor of a long war and start breathing again. The experience of the war can be touched in the works of the young artists and it is in this period, and in this context that Maja improves her work of new social, political and psychological aspects, being part of a new contemporary artistic scenery of the town, with personal projects and participating to collective shows.

An eight years lasting Diaspora and the forced displacement inspired Maja a particular attention to the question of the identity.
Individual and collective identity, private and social, chosen and imposed. A strong and at same time fleeting concept, the one of identity, from the ephemeral boundaries that cannot be delimited in a pre-built definition, useful for the slightly changes of senses we are nowadays used to.

The interest of the artist is especially captured by the subtle line of demarcation which separates and joints public and private, feminine and masculine, as well as the different social, national and political identities. The point of departure for each exploration is always interior, it generates from the personal experience and is strictly relied to the feminine identity. It’s inevitable therefore the recall to separation, to the abandon of her country, to the complex relationship among the memories, the different cultures and the migration.

An example of the examination of the relationship between the private and the public is the performance and installation I did not know (2002), realized in the main square of Graz, Austria. She created a labyrinth-link glass structure reproducing a living room with a TV blaring sounds of war, commented by a coupe who was simply answering each other “I did not know”. The installation remained in the square for a month.



To open the series of installations Women at work is the performance Dressed up, in which the artist manufacture a dress starting form fabrics painted with the map of the various regions of the ex-Yugoslavia, to represent the intimate and every-day nature of something tragic and apparently impersonal as war and the disintegration of a country. Yet again the identities mix and cross each other to create a whole part, to testify the complexity of life and relationships, and that we try to resolve imposing totalitarian solutions, trying to conciliate the opposites. Which is the sense of all this? Why we cannot simply accept that a question has more than an answer and more than a  point of view can be at same time valid? Is what Maja asks herself in the video installation I like – I don’t (1998-2000) realized with Danica Dakic, in which the two artists pronounce in different languages contradictory sentences nevertheless still true.

Also themes as ideology and religion arise from Maja Bajevic’s works, and it’s impossible on this purpose not to speak about the work Avanti popolo, a sound installation which resonates patriotic songs from all over the world, as well as the anthems of various political regimes – including the famous Italian revolutionary song from which the installation takes its title. National identity, patriotism, spirit of collectivism, unity and sense of belonging, are very convenient arguments which may become positive or negative according to the historical context. Visitors walking through the gallery can hear a song after the other until there is a cacophonic resonation of discordant music and incomprehensible words. The result is an absurd scenario that is a singular commentary on the concept of nationalism.

The theme of religion emerges from the work Double – Bubble, a video in which the artist questions the duality of religious ethics and morals. Religion is yet another element which plays an extremely significant social and political role in the construction of the world’s power hierarchies. The values and rules generated by the Church often contrast the cruel realities happening ‘in the name of God’, which is often used as an excuse for repression, discrimination and social marginalization.

Much attention is also paid to the conflict created by the disparity between the idealized and the reality. In her first web-based artwork I wish I was born in a Hollywood Movie, she focus how the ‘Hollywood machine’ creates a conflict in peoples’ minds between the images generated by popular movies and the stark everyday reality of common people. The work was a web photographic project, where images reminding cinema noir overlay each other, presenting multiple paths through which to navigate. The images, taken by Maja in Mexico city, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Venice and other towns, were representing ‘said’ and somewhat  nostalgic pictures: interiors in state of decay, windows without views, stained walls were accompanied by a soundtrack made of noises such as knocking, planes flying overhead, breaking glass or street musicians. For the many people who have no hope of attaining anything close to the idealized lives portrayed in popular culture, Bajevic suggests a state of perpetual displacement – living in exile from a fantasy life of happy endings that bears very little resemblance to reality.

Maja Bajevic’s work directly comments on prominent issues in recent history such as collective identity, tragedy, destiny, construction and the deconstruction of history, ideology and sociology. Acting as a catalyst, her work creates narratives that reference memory and identity, reflecting on the past and present of local socio-political events that possess global implications and referencing a collective destiny and the fragments of a shattered history. Soliciting the observer’s attention in order to understand her subtle language, Bajevic’s works range from video, to light and sound installations, to performance.

Bajevic has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the 50th Venice Biennale (Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion); Biennial de Valencia, Spain; 2001 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

By Adem Softic and Giulia Guerrini