Darja Bajagic: from ROOM EAST to Croy Nielsen with the blessings of John Waters

Darja Bajagic, born in 1990 in Titograd (ex Yugoslavia), graduated at the Yale School of Art in 2014 and now lives in New York City. In September 2014 ROOM EAST gallery hosted her solo exhibition, titled *C6ld c6mf6rt* which peeped into that dark side of sexuality where women meet serial killers and pornography is an insistent presence distorting every rational approach to sentiments. As we recently have written in regards with the work of talented Bunny Rogers this is a dangerous path to follow for an artist: he/she could end up promoting what, on the contrary, should be condemned. But conceiving an artwork is always a negotiation with freedom and ethics, and if someone is so brave to face the dark side then we have to look at his/her effort with our best positive approach. After all, wasn’t Gauguin himself who described his exploring the “dark tunnel” in the seminal “Noa Noa”?

 

Violence and sexuality are relevant contents of the mass media based society, and the power of information related to these categories is enormous. Everybody still remembers the work presented by Teresa Margolles at the Berlin Bienniale (313 covers from 2010 of the tabloid PM, published in Ciudad Juárez, an highly dangerous border city in Mexico) in 2012, or the crude portraits of prostitutes by Jean Luc Moulène shown at the last Palais de Tokyo Triennial. But if these works were to make a point in denouncing a specific problem, from a rather clear standpoint, in the case of Darja Bajagic and Bunny Rogers it appears that any possible point of view has been carefully wiped out in favour of an extreme, paroxysmal relativity. “I am just reporting a fragment of reality” the artist seems to state, whose approach is in this instance purely analytic. The artwork, made of form and material, is just turned into a unique (or personal) vehicle (or context) of a certain info.

 

For example, in the case of “Dacha: Jack Trawick handwritten brief one page letter + envelop” 2012 (we saw the piece at ROOM EAST booth at MiArt 2015), the artist composed and framed documents she bought from one of those many web sites who sells memorabilia from crime and criminals. In this case, a letter sent to Lori Hastings by serial killer Jack Harrison Trawick in 2003, five years before he was executed. Beside the letter is a screenshot of the website from which the artist has bought it, while its background has been taken from the on-line independent newspaper The Moscow News. A series of 5 numbers, from one to five, are placed at the top of the white space: time? In this info based scheme the focus is clearly on the act of collecting and politely organizing the materials: this is the reality, like it or not, and art is about it. John Waters would probably love this game.

 

So, we suggest he fly to Berlin in occasion of the gallery weekend (1-3 May) – the best prelude to Venice biennial – and visit Darja Bajagić’s two-artist show scheduled at Croy Nielsen (with Alexander Hardashnakov). At the same time, she will take part to a group show at Michael Thibault Gallery in LA (from 26 April, along with artists like Paul Cowan and Zak Kitnick, just to name a few). Otherwise, he could visit the group show currently at James Fuentes, in NYC, where Darja’s axe is waiting for him.

April 16, 2015