XURICH.- In a large overview exhibition, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst presents the oeuvre of French-Bosnian artist Maja Bajevic (b. 1967 in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina). This exhibition concentrates on her works from the last ten years, supplemented by new pieces, which were produced for this exhibition. Since the mid-1990s, the artist has worked on a very wide range of different issues, encompassing globalisation, inclusion/ exclusion, exploitation, neo-liberalism and their reciprocal effects. At the same time, Bajevic also repeatedly raises the issue of personal identity and homeland, and how these are constituted or “made impossible”. The presentation at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst demonstrates Bajevic’s ongoing work on themes like the abuse of power and religion, migration and marginalisation of the foreign, and the tension between local and global, while also positioning her oeuvre within the tradition of art that performs a social, informative function and focuses on changing prevalent convictions.

Many works on view in the exhibition comment on different constellations and distributions of power. In particular, the artist focuses on mechanisms that underlie social and political systems and their manipulative and incapacitating potential. A recurring theme in her artistic analysis is the exercise of power by political, economic, and religious authorities and how their mechanisms of control become inscribed and entrenched in individual worldviews. What are the instruments of state power and what strategies and media does it use? Where is the boundary between facts and targeted government or religious manipulation, between subtle and overtly political propaganda? To what extent can a national identity be formed? An artistic strategy often used by the artist is copying: by mimicking processes of authoritarian control, but taking them out of their actual context or usual communication channel—thereby alienating them from their intended purpose—she illustrates moments of manipulation or exploitation. Political slogans and propaganda catchwords often serve her as artistic material. As an ephemeral carrier of ideological content they become imprinted in collective memory. But what aspects will remain for future generations? What will find its way into the history books, what will be forgotten? It is these fields of tension between construction and facts, the individual and society, permanence and transience, inclusion and exclusion that Bajevic repeatedly renegotiates.

Her analysis of the mechanism of power bears witness to the words “biopolitics” and “biopower,” which have been discussed intensively in philosophy and art history for many years now and were proposed by Michel Foucault in The Will to Knowledge (1976). In his book, Foucault describes how the tendency of the modern state to control the human body is becoming ever stronger. In many of her works, Bajevic uses her own body as a surface on which to project these questions and to comment on the way in which biopolitics mixes with a disciplinary form of capitalism that regards its “population” as a mass entity needed for production and reproduction. Again and again, she also examines the role and function of the artist within this structure. But to subject the body of the artist to a purely biographical reading would fall short. A distinctive quality of Bajevic’s experiments, which are often distinguished by their conceptual simplicity, is that they address the viewer directly, and invite reflection and a variety of interpretations.

Maja Bajevic lives and works in Paris. In recent years, her work has been shown in a number of solo exhibitions at European institutions, e.g. at Daad Galerie in Berlin (2012), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2011) and Kunsthaus Glarus (2009). Simultaneously, Bajevic has also been represented in group exhibitions, e.g. at the Venice Biennale (2015), the 4th International Çanakkale Biennial in Turkey (2014), the National Museum of Art in Oslo (2014), the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece (2013), Art Beijing in China (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto (2011), the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2010), Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (2010) and at Documenta in Kassel (2007). In 2017 Bajevic got nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp.