Maja Bajevic

Biography

Maja Bajevic (Bosnia-Herzegovina / France, b. 1967 in Sarajevo) is an artist who takes a critical and witty approach to art in order to pinpoint dualities in human behaviour, in particular those involving power. 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 (the presence of scaffolding in her work is not fortuitous), whose shifts and derivations react to contradictory stimuli. Her work is about opening questions rather then giving answers, where every answered question opens a new territory with new brackets that give place to the unforeseen or the yet unspoken, in an never-ending continuum.
Since the mid-1990s, Bajevic has been working on a range of different issues, encompassing globalisation, inclusion/exclusion, exploitation, neo-liberalism and their reciprocal effects. At the same time, she repeatedly raises the issue of personal identity and homeland, and how these are constituted or “made impossible”. Bajevic’s work, ranges from video, installation, performance and sound to text, crafts, drawing, printmaking, machinery and photography.
Informed by the artist's own migratory life, previous works emphasised her interest in the contingent nature of political stability. Addressing themes like the abuse of power and religion, migration and marginalisation of the foreign, and the tension between local and global, her oeuvre can also be positioned within the tradition of art that performs a social, informative function and focuses on changing prevalent convictions.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, (2017), The James Gallery, New York (2012),  DAAD Galerie, Berlin (2012) and Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2011). Selected group exhibition include: "We never Sleep", Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2020); "Divided We Stand", Busan Biennale (2018), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2016); 56th Venice Biennial (2015) “Documenta 12”, Kassel, (2007). In 2017 Bajevic was shortlisted for the Prix Marcel Duchamp.