Maja Bajevic

Maja Bajevic. To Be Continued. From May 27 to October 3, 2011

Maja Bajevic, artist:

What always interested me as an artist is the distinction between high and low art or between arts and crafts. The Palacio is a space that I believe can only work with a site-specific installation.

What struck me when I first saw the Palacio is that it seemed to me like a sleeping beauty, like a building that has been untouched by the many very important events that have been happening in Spain in the near history.

What I tried to do is introduce these events into the Palacio, not only regarding Spain, but regarding the political and economic changes throughout the last century.
I was trying to approach this theme, which is a very heavy theme actually – a hundred years of history and of politics and economics – in a playful manner, because I believe that dismantling these one-sided beliefs can be done through humour also.
A slogan is something that is addressed to the people. It is a simplified version of communication. They are used in a couple of ways in the exhibition.
One is the sound installation, another is in the performance and the third is the steam machine. All three of them have an ephemeral character.

None of those elements one can really touch and keep. And that is what happens, I believe, with history. History is something that one cannot really grasp, or there are so many possible interpretations of history.
I tried to alienate them from their source. The first level of alienation is translating. They are all translated into English and into Spanish. Very famous slogans, like Hitler’s slogan, "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer," is very recognisable in German, but in its translated version, we cannot place it so quickly anymore.

The second level of alienation is the melodies and the game that is used in the sound installation. The principle of the game is the last word of your sentence has to be the first word of my sentence, which puts the slogans in an order which has nothing to do anymore with their meaning or with their historical background or with the year when they appeared.
And the third level of alienation is the melodies themselves, with a composer who tried to give them a new character, making an opera singer sing them, because nowadays opera is regarded as high art, although that is not its background. It started first as also art for the people, but nowadays opera is something that we regard as high art. But then when an opera singer sings slogans, there is also alienation or something disfunctioning.
I wouldn’t really categorise myself as an activist. I would say more that I am an observer.

But I’m very much interested in politics and in sociology, social events because I find it fascinating. And it tells also a lot about human nature, about human behaviour, about power relations, about shifts. Why do we believe in one thing today and we don’t believe in it anymore tomorrow? And how is it possible that masses of people in one moment believe in something and tomorrow behave as if it had never happened?

Something very interesting happened when I started working on this exhibition, when I was already doing the research about the slogans and about these shifts that occurred and suddenly all these events in the Middle East happened. And then now when I came to Madrid to install the exhibition, there is this big movement in the Puerta del Sol and Barcelona. So the title To Be Continued actually came when I realised it is a never-ending story in a way. I have just chosen to take an excerpt from one part of history to explore it, but it is a story that is never ending. And proof for that is also what is happening now in Madrid.