New monograph.
This publication on the French-Bosnian artist Maja Bajevic accompanies her comprehensive exhibition at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and focuses on her most recent bodies of works. Since the mid-1990s she has explored a wide variety of issues related to
globalization and migration, inclusion and exclusion, exploitation,
neoliberalism, and the interactions between these notions. Bajevic also consistently investigates her own identity, and the meaning of “home” and what this constitutes. Her oeuvre is part of a tradition in art that deals with social and
educational issues, and that wants to shake up the prevailing social consciousness. In this respect, Bajevic's approach is all-encompassing; for example, when she compiles an archive of political slogans, she focuses on the entire political spectrum. By bringing together the core of Bajevic's oeuvre with specially commissioned essays by art historians and curators, this publication reflects on her main artistic strategies and themes, standing as a reference monograph covering the last ten years of her work. The book is divided into three chapters: “Power,” “Governance,” and “Labor,” and includes essays by Barbara Biedermann, Manuel Borja-Villel,
Boris Buden,
Raphael Gygax, and Ana Janevski.
Maja Bajević (born 1967, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, lives and works in Berlin, Paris and Sarajevo) received a Diploma of the Fine Arts Academy of Sarajevo in 1990 and continued with her Master studies in 1991. In 1996, Maja Bajević achieved a Diplome of the ENSBA in Paris, France. She further pursued Post Diploma studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Bajević works in the fields of video, performance, photography and installation.
Maja Bajević confronts privacy with the public as well as the personal with the political. Her personal view on phenomena of a global world becomes the epicentre of public discussions about truth,
identity and homeland. Subjects such as the abuse of power or religion are as central and common to her work as
migration, marginalisation of the foreign and the tension between the local and the global. By questioning political and economical structures of our time, she is enabled to create works of stunning subtlety.
Several critics have noted Maja Bajević's engagement with issues of political power and patriarchy, and, more specifically, with the exclusion of women from the historical record traced in cultural patrimony. Less commented upon are the ways in which, from the beginning, she has addressed the question of reception by striving to resist any easy consumption of her work by the art-world systems. Today, Maja Bajević is one of the most important artists rooted in
Eastern Europe.
