Maja Bajevic (b. 1967) connects the private with the public and the intimate with the political. Focusing on the themes such as collective identity, loss of landmarks, the construction and deconstruction of ideology, she creates subtle and poetical works that critically cross-examine the political and economic structures of our present time.
She takes a critical and witty approach to art in order to pinpoint dualities in human behavior, in particular those involving power. In her artistic practice she questions fixed worldviews by showing how political structures and moral concepts are bound to historical settings. Maja Bajevic broaches the issues of History and Identity as unfulfilled constructions, unsteady and ever changing. The power of history is opposed to the power of choice and interpretation; collective memory to collective amnesia, objective accounts to subjective storytelling and imagination – as a construction in progress, fluid and unstable, whose shifts and derivations react to contradictory stimuli. Bajevic’s work, performative in many ways, ranges from video, installation, performance and sound to text, crafts, machinery and photography.
Maja Bajevic
Steam Machine, 2011
Marcelle Marcel is a young artist duo that started their activity in 2011. Both of the partners have been involved, and still are, in the art world since some time, one works as a curator, the other is a artist, and therefore they choose to use a pseudonym when appearing in a new context and a different role.
For their first solo exhibition they choose replica paintings of images published on the front page of famous daily newspaper, such as the New York Times, from the 11th of September 2001 and the 9th of November 1989 accompanied by the journal itself. The gap in between the major events that happened on those two dates and the edition of the newspaper that is not yet showing those events but will only show them tomorrow is what drew their attention to the issue. The paintings are showing candidates on campaign trail meeting representatives from different communities or other events that in the light of the event that really happened on that date seem absurd, unimportant and even funny. The use of the painting genre for this type of connection and the mirroring effect wisely make the works otherwise eloquent.
Marcelle Marcel
The Home Stretch, 2011, 37,4 X 58,5 cm, oil on canvas
New York Times front page photo copy, 11.09.2001; 41,9 x 39,6 cm
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