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Maja Bajevic
Most of Maja Bajevic’s work stems from her personal experiences,
the socio-political turmoil that took place in the former Yugoslavia in
90s and the subsequent period of transition after the war in Bosnia –Herzegovina.
Back in Black is a work that deals with the personal dimensions
of trauma in the face of war and violence. In the video – a double
projection – which was filmed in a traditional café decked
with portraits of the late Yugoslav leader Tito, masked individuals recount
disturbing, sick jokes about the war in Sarajevo in a cynical, alarmingly
pedestrian and deadpan fashion. The dark humour here can be seen both
as a strategy of catharsis but perhaps also as a mechanism that can enable
the expression of the unspeakable, the unutterable or ultimately, what
is, by-and-large, unrepresentable. How one can deal with such personal
and collective trauma, seems to be one of the questions raised? How can
one convey and represent personal suffering that resists description because
of its sheer magnitude?
Back In Black, 2003 / Double Projection, 10' 9"
/ Courtesy the artist
About the work
The work of Maja Bajevic is related to her personal biography and the
political and social circumstances in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The
dissident position of Bajevic, who has been living in Paris since the
early 1990s, exists as a result of her connections to Sarajevo and her
critical distance to the city and to the new dominant ideology, as well
as to the political and national condition after the war in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Her work Back in Black consists of a double projection of
a video taken in the nostalgic atmosphere of a café decorated by
various portraits of Josip Broz Tito, the legendary president of Socialist,
non-aligned Yugoslavia, a country in which the national, gender and class
questions were supposedly solved once and forever. As on a stage, the
masked persons tell dark, cruel and cynical jokes about wartime Sarajevo.
The socks on their faces initially recall an armed and masked robber from
the early ages of terrorism, when faces were still hidden, but the function
of the mask is not to hide the face, but to make it recognizable –
to make it identical and replaceable – and to prevent easy and naïve
identification. This is also the function of the jokes: their dark humor
eludes understanding and they do not suggest that humor is the vital energy
that triumphs over all the difficulties, nor does it create a distance
from the reality; humour denotes the very Real that cannot be symbolized.
The cruelty of jokes is the only truth, the unutterable, the trauma that
is not being discussed, and post-war Sarajevo acknowledges it in the form
the jokes.
What, How & for Whom / WHW (Zagreb-based curatorial collective)
www.scca.ba/artistfiles/maja/main.htm
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