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мАјА БАјевИћ
MAJA BAJEviĆ
The Matrix of Memory
Memory, which concerns us, even if it is not ours, but is,
how to say it, beside ours, and which determines us almost
as much as our history.
Georges Perec, Je suis né
In an interview given during the exhibition Manifesta 3,
where her video Women at Work—Under Construction
(1999) was shown, Maja Bajević stated that in it she
resorted to “une manière spécifiquement féminine… de
réconstruire un espace perdu”. 1 This joint performance,
and two subsequent works by Bajević, The Observers (2000)
and Washing Up (2001), are delicately imbued with her
inimitable politics of domesticity: in her solo pieces and
in those realized in cooperation with other women, this
politics is made manifest through a public performance
of diverse manual activities such as embroidering, sewing
or laundering. These habitual female chores, repetitive and
monotonous, are carried out in public spaces so as to lay
bare women’s customary activities for coping with—absences.
The theme of absence, I believe, is at the core of Maja
Bajević’s art. Most of her works relate to subjective ‘voids’,
distances, digressions, separations and the possibility of
loss: they refer to absent ‘spaces’, spaces that may have
existed as actual homes or homelands, or have been imagi-
ned as “opaque thresholds” (Pepe Espaliú). To deal with
absences—in art as in life—entails most of all a recollection
of formerly existing and now absent presences: then the
matrix of memory inexorably commences to pulse.
[…]
The set of performances called Women at Work is staged in
those public spaces that one usually passes by or through.
Since these works ultimately deal with the absence of home,
the artist intentionally avoids the semi-public venues consi-
dered to be the ‘home of the arts’ and consequently stages
the performances in freely accessible spaces that are far
from being able to induce homey sensations. The politics
of domesticity here also implies the practice of emplacement:
the presence of women who perform domestic chores lasting
many hours or days transforms these non-spaces—a façade
(Under Construction), a castle (The Observers), a bathhouse
(Washing Up)—into ritual places in which an interface
of (the artist’s) individual and borrowed memory could occur.
These venues thus become sites of temporary existence,
where one does needlework or laundering as if one’s home
and household members were there. These places are now
inhabited by liminal personae, by those who are passeurs,
people-in-passage.
[…]
The Castle
The Observers (2000) takes place inside a castle, and it
elaborates the condition of passeuses, women-in-passage.
[…] Following in the footsteps of Frans Hals, Maja Bajević
dressed her castle guests and herself in the period fashion.
[…] Only video and documentary shots of the castle scenes,
and the emerging oil portrait painted by Alma Suljević, ‘tell’
us that, except for the artist, all her companions wear head-
scarves that undeniably indicate their Muslim background.
This is a culturally specific sign, since Muslim convention
demands that women must have covered heads whenever
they leave their private sphere. This sign is also evident in
Under Construction, and also in a later performance,
Washing Up. It is true that due to nationalism(s), the war
and the post-Communist ‘re-invention’ of religion, the
Muslim Bosnian society also underwent considerable
Islamization. […] The wearing of headscarves by ‘post-
Socialist’ women, who already started to appear in public
with their hair covered (and hardly ever in a chador or with
veiled faces) during the recent Bosnian war, does indicate
a new cultural-cum-ideological swing in the post-war
Bosnia in that it implies the social visibility of one culture
within a multicultural setting. […] The sojourn in the castle,
however, becomes a peculiar interface of many cultures
— the Calvinist garments and postures captured in the
original painting by Frans Hals, the Muslim outlook, with a
French Baroque palace in the rear. None of them is dominant,
nor is it totally erased; they simply cohabit in the same
cultural space.
In her series of performances Women at Work Maja
Bajevic does not deal, I think, with that collective time
institutionalized as History, but with the time of memory:
this is individualized time, a time that is made personal.
If we presume that during the shared ‘feminine’ labor an
interplay of personal and shared memories also takes place,
each of the performances becomes, in effect, a Trauerarbeit,
a joint act of mourning. This process, though, implies that
‘wounds’ and ‘absent spaces’ (or absent lives) are remembered
in an imperfect manner, as Kaja Silverman suggests:
“The function of recollection … is to transform, not to
reproduce… To remember perfectly would be forever to
inhabit the same cultural order. However, to remember
imperfectly is to bring images from the past into an ever
new and dynamic relation to those through which we expe-
rience the present, and in the process ceaselessly to shift
the contours and significance not only of the past, but also
of the present”. 2 The matrix of memory thus pulses on
behalf of the here and now.
Bojana Pejić
Originally published in: Maja Bajević: Women at Work,
Sarajevo: The National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
2002
Pages 34–35 and 38–39:
stills from Women at Work—The Observers, 2001
Performance / video, 8 minutes 20 seconds
courtesy maja bajević and galerie michel rein, Paris
maja bajevic was born 1967 in yugoslavia. she lives and works in france. in her performances, videos, installations and photographs
bajević connects the private with the public and the intimate with the political. focusing on the themes of migration
and identity, the marginalization of the alien and a contradiction between the local and the global she creates subtle works
that critically interrogate the political and economic structures of our age. bajević’s work comments on issues in recent history
such as collective identity and the construction and deconstruction of history, ideology, and sociology.
Women at Work—The Observers, 2000, five-day
performance / video, Château Voltaire, Ferney
Voltaire, France, 2000
The famous painting Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse’
(ca. 1664) by Dutch painter Frans Hals served as
the reference point for this photograph. Staging myself
with four women refugees from Srebrenica—Fazila Efendić,
Nirha Efendić, Zlatija Efendić and Hatidža Verlašević—in
the same position and the same clothing as Hals’s models,
is a way of questioning the usual conception and prejudice
people have regarding refugees. The second level of reflection
is the role of the Dutch observers presented through a
remake of a painting made in the Dutch-Flemish style.
The Dutch forces were, namely, part of the UN observers
who where supposed to protect Srebrenica, but instead
let Srebrenica fall into the hands of the Serb army. The
massacre and ethnic cleansing of the male Muslim popu-
lation occurred in mid-July 1995.
The production of the group portrait was followed by
a performance at the Château Voltaire in France, where the
women refugees and myself enjoyed leisurely days sowing
and embroidering. We were accompanied by a woman artist
from Sarajevo, Alma Suljević, otherwise a performance
and installation artist, who tried to paint our group portrait
in oil. Thus, the entire constellation was a game of appear-
ances, as the role of each of the participants became slightly
twisted. The refugees were not actual noble ladies living
in the castle, nor was the artist, ‘observing’ and portraying
us, a painter skilled in Flemish style.
Maja Bajević
1 it was “a specifically feminine manner . . . for reconstructing a lost space.” bajević cited in alain
dreyfus, “manifesta, passeport pour ljubljana,” Libération, september 11, 2000.
2 kaja silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, New york and london: routledge, 1996, p. 189.
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