Your browser does not support the video tag.
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Marco Cadioli - The Whirlpool
  • © ARSHAKE | ISSN 2283-3676
  • CONTACT
  • Login
Arshake
  • ABOUT US
    • ABOUT US
    • PROJECT
    • MEDIA/PARTNERSHIPS
    • CONTACT US
  • FOCUS
    • All
    • Focus
    • From the Past
    • Interview
    Pamela Diamante at the Gilda Lavia Gallery

    Pamela Diamante at the Gilda Lavia Gallery

    Arcangelo Sassolino at the Continua Gallery

    Arcangelo Sassolino at the Continua Gallery

    Experimental Fellowship at Bauhaus Earth

    Experimental Fellowship at Bauhaus Earth

    Open call – Schermo dell’Arte

    Open call – Schermo dell’Arte

    Open Call: State of the ART(ist)

    Open Call: State of the ART(ist)

    Interview | Liu Jiayu

    Interview | Liu Jiayu

    Theatre of Proof at PAV

    Theatre of Proof at PAV

    Wetland Role-Playing Game

    Wetland Role-Playing Game

    Wetland Role-Playing Game

    DAN Galeria: Geometria como impulso poético

  • FRAME
    FRAME > Stop, Listen, Look

    FRAME > Stop, Listen, Look

    FRAME > Shining Hat

    FRAME > Shining Hat

    FRAME > To Breathe

    FRAME > To Breathe

    FRAME >  The fairies will find us if we leave a trail

    FRAME > The fairies will find us if we leave a trail

    FRAME > Hundred Changes in Life

    FRAME > Hundred Changes in Life

    FRAME >  Large Resemblagé

    FRAME > Large Resemblagé

    FRAME > Rubber Pencil Devil

    FRAME > Rubber Pencil Devil

    FRAME > ARC 2000

    FRAME > ARC 2000

    FRAME > Seeders and Leechers

    FRAME > Seeders and Leechers

  • VIDEO POST
    VIDEO POST > Augmented Shadow: Inside

    VIDEO POST > Augmented Shadow: Inside

    VIDEO POST > Anthofluid

    VIDEO POST > Anthofluid

    VIDEO POST > Isoscope

    VIDEO POST > Isoscope

    VIDEO POST > Kihikihi

    VIDEO POST > Kihikihi

    VIDEO POST > Triosophia

    VIDEO POST > Triosophia

    VIDEO POST > Kosei Komatsu

    VIDEO POST > Kosei Komatsu

    VIDEO POST > STRATACUT

    VIDEO POST > STRATACUT

    VIDEO POST > File Tabs no. 1

    VIDEO POST > File Tabs no. 1

    VIDEO POST > The Recap

    VIDEO POST > The Recap

  • SPECIAL PROJECT
    • ARSHAKE’S BANNER
    • CRITICAL GROUNDS
    • YOUNG ITALIAN ARTISTS
    • GAME OVER
    • GAME OVER • Loading
    • EXTERNAL PROJECTS
      • BACKSTAGE | ONSTAGE
      • PERCORSI • 6 years of the Terna Prize
      • TEMPO IMPERFETTO
  • RESOURCES
    • ARCHIVE
    • CALLS
    • ONLINE RESOUCES
  • it IT
  • en English
No Result
View All Result
Arshake
  • ABOUT US
    • ABOUT US
    • PROJECT
    • MEDIA/PARTNERSHIPS
    • CONTACT US
  • FOCUS
    • All
    • Focus
    • From the Past
    • Interview
    Pamela Diamante at the Gilda Lavia Gallery

    Pamela Diamante at the Gilda Lavia Gallery

    Arcangelo Sassolino at the Continua Gallery

    Arcangelo Sassolino at the Continua Gallery

    Experimental Fellowship at Bauhaus Earth

    Experimental Fellowship at Bauhaus Earth

    Open call – Schermo dell’Arte

    Open call – Schermo dell’Arte

    Open Call: State of the ART(ist)

    Open Call: State of the ART(ist)

    Interview | Liu Jiayu

    Interview | Liu Jiayu

    Theatre of Proof at PAV

    Theatre of Proof at PAV

    Wetland Role-Playing Game

    Wetland Role-Playing Game

    Wetland Role-Playing Game

    DAN Galeria: Geometria como impulso poético

  • FRAME
    FRAME > Stop, Listen, Look

    FRAME > Stop, Listen, Look

    FRAME > Shining Hat

    FRAME > Shining Hat

    FRAME > To Breathe

    FRAME > To Breathe

    FRAME >  The fairies will find us if we leave a trail

    FRAME > The fairies will find us if we leave a trail

    FRAME > Hundred Changes in Life

    FRAME > Hundred Changes in Life

    FRAME >  Large Resemblagé

    FRAME > Large Resemblagé

    FRAME > Rubber Pencil Devil

    FRAME > Rubber Pencil Devil

    FRAME > ARC 2000

    FRAME > ARC 2000

    FRAME > Seeders and Leechers

    FRAME > Seeders and Leechers

  • VIDEO POST
    VIDEO POST > Augmented Shadow: Inside

    VIDEO POST > Augmented Shadow: Inside

    VIDEO POST > Anthofluid

    VIDEO POST > Anthofluid

    VIDEO POST > Isoscope

    VIDEO POST > Isoscope

    VIDEO POST > Kihikihi

    VIDEO POST > Kihikihi

    VIDEO POST > Triosophia

    VIDEO POST > Triosophia

    VIDEO POST > Kosei Komatsu

    VIDEO POST > Kosei Komatsu

    VIDEO POST > STRATACUT

    VIDEO POST > STRATACUT

    VIDEO POST > File Tabs no. 1

    VIDEO POST > File Tabs no. 1

    VIDEO POST > The Recap

    VIDEO POST > The Recap

  • SPECIAL PROJECT
    • ARSHAKE’S BANNER
    • CRITICAL GROUNDS
    • YOUNG ITALIAN ARTISTS
    • GAME OVER
    • GAME OVER • Loading
    • EXTERNAL PROJECTS
      • BACKSTAGE | ONSTAGE
      • PERCORSI • 6 years of the Terna Prize
      • TEMPO IMPERFETTO
  • RESOURCES
    • ARCHIVE
    • CALLS
    • ONLINE RESOUCES
No Result
View All Result
Arshake
No Result
View All Result
Home News Focus

Mrđan Bajić, Matter as Memory

Antonello Tolve by Antonello Tolve
31/10/2018
in Focus
Mrđan Bajić, Matter as Memory

Characterised by an atmosphere aesthetically transforming documents into monuments, a totaliser of knowledge able to contain within it all the minuscule traces left behind by man, the production by Mrđan Bajić (Belgrade, 1957) represents a flow of ideas, a container that invites us to reflect on our collective conscience and reignite it, and a terrain that absorbs memory and history. Bajić’s intention is not to pronounce a moral judgment, but rather to provide precious dawnings of truth that are «effectively fragile but irreversible, obstinate and resistant to the shocks» of falsehood.

Active since the early 1980s – Bajić’s first solo exhibition took place in 1983, organised at the Galerija Dom Omladine in Belgrade – the artist moves with the currents of revolutionary art, emerging from a multicultural scenario that sets aside ideologies to take on, even if only for a short time, new ideas and trends, in order to freely express himself and open himself up to international debates.

Bajić radically changed perspectives after the following events: the Balkan Wars which broke up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija) following the death of Tito on 4 May 1980; the Agrokomerc scandal (1987); the wave of nationalism initiated by Milošević and connected to it, as a way of covering it up, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Memorandum (1986); and the massive bombings by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

After these events, Bajić embarked on a reflective journey in which ethics, aesthetics and politics – man is a political animal, warns Rancière in Le partage du sensible (The Distribution of the Sensible) – are interwoven with enduring memories. These memories return between the pages of an artificially refined narrative, the face of which is not solely signed by terror but also open to a global dialogue, illuminated by a desire to evoke, rebuild and recover hope – without forgetting.

Over the course of two decades, 1987-2007, a deeply held desire to construct an archive (which had already begun in 1980) led Bajić to catalogue the life of a world now in ruins in order to recount the miracles and traumas of the new geopolitical sphere (postcomunist, postsocialist and postmodern) through a cycle of works that overlap, permeate and emerge alongside each other – Trash (1987-2007), Krv, znoj i suze | Blood, Sweat, and Tears (1997-1998), Spomenici | Monuments (1997-2001) and Jugomuzej / Yugomuseum (1998-2004).

The artist’s aim was to record the cultural climate of the time and define a complex strategy of destructuration, dissolution and subversion of conventional stylistic sculptural features. Since 2005 the discourse has become more focused, more markedly open to ostranenie (defamiliarisation, from the Russian остранение), displacement and the extraordinary challenging of the senses. An example of a project from this time is Jugomuzej, a catalogue of memory, a collection of materials in which capitalism and communism are connected through the razor wire of irony to demonstrate social instability, the unsteady step of a world that is moving suddenly from the “communist dream” to a “consumer’s paradise” of total control. Jugomuzej is a utopian project for a virtual museum in which «objects, personalities and situations of historical importance for the formation, existence and disintegration of Yugoslavia are collected». Jugomuzej represents a world which, with the future now behind, associates catastrophe with the construction of the new, whose advancement clearly recalls events, months, days and hours.

Described by Lidija Merenik as skulptotektura, the linguistic models moulded by Bajić work through the collective sense and, shamelessly, launch on the art platform devices that are highly ironic, whimsical and able to shake up society’s nervous system. This has been especially true since 2005, when the artist completed Backup which could encompass and contain all his work – «notes, drafts, texts, lost works, started works, discarded works and completed works come together and are directly connected with each other as «fragments of a search for meaning, from past ages that are already encapsulated in a now incomprehensible circumstantial bubble». The systematic use of captions – to be understood as integral parts of discourse, indispensable elements and significant traces – also represents for the artist an essential glue which creates a relation between conscience and knowledge, a fertile awakening where the real becomes the object of fiction, a useful function with which to seize and decipher reality.

La classe ouvriére va au Paradise (The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 2012), I Like America and America Likes Me (2014), Tatlin (2016), the imposing Globus – Velika Skulptura (2017-2018) and Germany (2017-2018) are some of the titles where citations summoning names from contemporary art such as Joseph Beuys and Vladimir Evgrafovič Tatlin (who aimed to build the good of humanity) can be found; and even cyclical moments – this is the case for Facciamo finta di niente (Let Us Look the Other Way, 2014, 2016, 2017) which gives the title to this exhibition – that are ready to create a sensorial movement, an elegant oscillation ranging from the playful to the tragic, from the cruel to the ironic, from melancholic appeal to mocking desecration, demythologising and demystification of great stories, of great collective blunders.

Cars, soft toys and childish dolls, moulds, garnets, laces, globes and balls, small crocodiles, buses and humorous vanitas (meaningless objects) invade the scene to trace a plastic and polymaterial discorse where context and causality merge thanks to an – always able and generous – short circuit revealing the face of an effervescent spiky irony. With surreal and, at times, metaphysical tendencies that never surrender to a bitter smile, but develop through an ars combinatoria (combinatorial art) at the base of which is the desire to amplify the relentless flux, a potential Gesamstkunstwerk (a total work of art) can be found. Gesamstkunstwerk is connected to the symbol, understood in its etymological essence (συμβάλλω), as piecing together the elements of an infinte line of thought concerning memory. Mrđan Bajić today offers projects where the recourse to techniques of collage and assemblage becomes increasingly urgent and ever more connected to a desire that wants to reconciliate some of the historical rifts and contextually create visual condensations, judicial movements of objects, disorientating feelings that seduce until an illusion is reached through which the illusion itself is enchanted and destroyed.


Mrđan Bajić, materia e (è) memoria is the text by Antonello Tolve that accompanies the exhibition
 “Facciamo Finta di Niente”
Mrđan Bajić
GABA.MC, Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata, Italy, 05.10 – 30.11.2018

images (all): “Facciamo Finta di Niente”. Mrđan Bajić, GABA.MC, Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata,  exhibition view, photo: Matteo Catani

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Antonello TolvearshakeMrđan Bajić
ShareTweetShareSend
Previous Post

Call for entries > HER SHE LOVES SAN LORENZO

Next Post

The Cool Couple – DIGITALIVE 18

Antonello Tolve

Antonello Tolve

Related Posts

Pamela Diamante at the Gilda Lavia Gallery
exhibitions

Pamela Diamante at the Gilda Lavia Gallery

by Fabio Giagnacovo
04/06/2025
Arcangelo Sassolino at the Continua Gallery
exhibitions

Arcangelo Sassolino at the Continua Gallery

by Arshake
28/05/2025

CALLS

Experimental Fellowship at Bauhaus Earth
Calls

Experimental Fellowship at Bauhaus Earth

14/05/2025
Open call – Schermo dell’Arte
Calls

Open call – Schermo dell’Arte

07/05/2025
Open Call: State of the ART(ist)
Calls

Open Call: State of the ART(ist)

05/05/2025
RE:HUMANISM Art Prize 4
Calls

RE:HUMANISM Art Prize 4

18/03/2025
https://www.arshake.com/special-project-banner/young-italian-artists/
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Arshake is a collaborative artistic project, blurring the borders between art, science and technology, information and production.

  • Focus
  • Video post
  • Frame
  • Special Project
  • Interview
  • Calls
  • Exhibitions

One more step - Check your email and click the confirmation link

© 2024 – ARSHAKE

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Gestisci Consenso Cookie
Per fornire le migliori esperienze, utilizziamo tecnologie come i cookie per memorizzare e/o accedere alle informazioni del dispositivo. Il consenso a queste tecnologie ci permetterà di elaborare dati come il comportamento di navigazione o ID unici su questo sito. Non acconsentire o ritirare il consenso può influire negativamente su alcune caratteristiche e funzioni.
Funzionale Always active
L'archiviazione tecnica o l'accesso sono strettamente necessari al fine legittimo di consentire l'uso di un servizio specifico esplicitamente richiesto dall'abbonato o dall'utente, o al solo scopo di effettuare la trasmissione di una comunicazione su una rete di comunicazione elettronica.
Preferenze
L'archiviazione tecnica o l'accesso sono necessari per lo scopo legittimo di memorizzare le preferenze che non sono richieste dall'abbonato o dall'utente.
Statistiche
L'archiviazione tecnica o l'accesso che viene utilizzato esclusivamente per scopi statistici. L'archiviazione tecnica o l'accesso che viene utilizzato esclusivamente per scopi statistici anonimi. Senza un mandato di comparizione, una conformità volontaria da parte del vostro Fornitore di Servizi Internet, o ulteriori registrazioni da parte di terzi, le informazioni memorizzate o recuperate per questo scopo da sole non possono di solito essere utilizzate per l'identificazione.
Marketing
L'archiviazione tecnica o l'accesso sono necessari per creare profili di utenti per inviare pubblicità, o per tracciare l'utente su un sito web o su diversi siti web per scopi di marketing simili.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
Visualizza le preferenze
{title} {title} {title}
No Result
View All Result
  • ABOUT US
    • ABOUT US
    • PROJECT
    • MEDIA/PARTNERSHIPS
    • CONTACT US
  • FOCUS
  • FRAME
  • VIDEO POST
  • SPECIAL PROJECT
    • ARSHAKE’S BANNER
    • CRITICAL GROUNDS
    • YOUNG ITALIAN ARTISTS
    • GAME OVER
    • GAME OVER • Loading
    • EXTERNAL PROJECTS
      • BACKSTAGE | ONSTAGE
      • PERCORSI • 6 years of the Terna Prize
      • TEMPO IMPERFETTO
  • RESOURCES
    • ARCHIVE
    • CALLS
    • ONLINE RESOUCES

© 2024 – ARSHAKE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.