Maja Bajevic: Power Governance Labor

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, that aims 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 Bajevic (born 1967) lives and works in Paris and Sarajevo. In recent years her work has been shown in a number of solo exhibitions in European institutions, e.g. at Daad Galerie in Berlin (2012), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2011), Kunsthaus Glarus (2009), and the National Gallery of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo (2006). Bajevic has also been represented in group exhibitions, notably at the 56th Venice Biennale All the World's Futures (2015), the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece (2013), the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2010), and Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (2010).

Maja Bajević (née en 1967 à Sarajevo, Bosnie-Herzégovine, vit et travaille à Berlin, Paris et Sarajevo) est actuellement l'une des artistes les plus importantes en Europe de l'Est. Elle développe sa pratique artistique dans les domaines de la vidéo, de la performance, de la photographie et de l'installation. Ses œuvres confrontent le privé avec le public, l'intime avec le politique. Des sujets tels que le pouvoir, l'identité, la vérité, la patrie et la religion sont aussi centraux et communs à son travail que le thème de la migration, la marginalisation de l'étranger ou la tension entre le local et le global.