Double Bubble, 2001
Maja Bajevic was born in Sarajevo in 1967. A French citizen since 2003, she lives and works in Paris. After studying at the Sarajevo Faculty of Fine Arts, in 1996 she specialised in Multimedia Arts at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. This multimedia artist has employed a variety of means of expression: performance, videos, installations and photography, achieving international recognition through her participation in leading exhibitions, including the Biennali in Venice, Istanbul and Tirana, and Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana (Slovenia).
Since her exile in Paris in 1997, Maja Bajevic has become known in Sarajevo with her series of performances Women at Work.
Her work is autobiographical, marked as they are by her memories of the traumatic wars of the former Yugoslavia, in the face of which she has reacted, on occasion, with cynicism and even a caustic black humour. Bajevic represents the generation of artists whose work questions the relationship of the population with the war and, from this, a new form of resistance arises.
One constant motif in the work of Bajevic is the journey from individual matters and situations to more general ideas, making her stories, which spring from personal experiences, something universal. Her work provides clear criticism of the relationship between the public and the private, between the individual and the group.
In her video Double-Bubble, Bajevic plays all the characters that appear in it and makes statements as paradoxical as: "I go to church. I rape women"; "My wife wears a chador. I make her do it. Then I go with prostitutes", or "I don't eat pork. I don't drink during Ramadan. But I take ecstasy". These words, some of enormous brutality, reflect the duality of the ethics and morals in religion, the hypocrisy under which certain religions live. A hypocrisy whose victims are always the same: women. This is one of the main themes of Bajevic's work, and the most political and committed one.
The artist denounces acts of oppression and violence carried out in the name of religion.
In her own words, Bajevic aims to show the nationalist, fundamentalist face hiding behind religion. She states that, today, some contradictions that were previously hidden are finally being exposed.
"I free people from sins. They pay me for this. Everything has its price". God is used by the church as a pretext for repression, abuse, violence, discrimination and social marginalisation. "Anyone who thinks differently must die. That is the will of God. I am merely His messenger", is the last sentence of the video.
Pronounced in first person, and making use of an extremely raw simplicity, these statements are likened to the atrocities committed during the events of the Yugoslavian civil war. Bajevic repeats these words directly on and off screen. When one of the voices talks to the observer, the other speaks for the viewer, in their name.
Double-Bubble becomes a portrait of psychological submission to religious orthodoxy.
Technical details
- Original title:
- Double Bubble
- Registration number:
- 2652
- Artist:
- Bajevic, Maja
- Date created:
- 2001
- Date acquired:
- 2006
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
- Object type:
- Audiovisual recording
- Media:
- Single-channel video, colour, sound, 3 min 40 s
- Edition number:
- Ed. 3/5
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Work purchased thanks to María Entrecanales
- Copyright:
- © Maja Bajevic, VEGAP, Barcelona
- It has accessibility resources:
- No
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
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