In yesterday's post we looked at two women artists showcasing their work in the Arsenale at the 56th International Art Biennale. Let's continue the thread with another artist who puts women at the centre of her artistic practice with a post focusing on Maja Bajevic.
Born in Sarajevo, but based in Paris, Bajevic has worked throughout the years with different media, including film and video installations, audio pieces, drawings and performances. Like Mika Rottenberg she often tackles the notion of identity and the presence (or the absence) of women within the recent historical context.
The collective aspect of her performances combined with feminine and domestic practices developed in public places wounded by conflict and the notions of social, manual, artistic labor are further key aspects to analyse and understand Bajevic's work.
In previous installations the artist filmed for example a group of Bosnian women survivors of the 1995 massacre and expulsions in Srebrenica while they worked on an immense embroidered tarpaulin to be hung on the façade of the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
In the last few years Bajevic started adding to her installations texts and text-based messages. In the pieces on display at the Arsenale she integrated instead graphics referencing financial and economic data.
Entitled "Arts, Crafts and Facts" (2015), the installation includes a series of rugs, carpets and tapestries in which traditional Bosnian embroidery is used to replicate the fluctuations of the Stock Market indexes around the world. In this way the artist plays with the material/immaterial dichotomies, turning intangible financial data into a tangible product.
Production worker's pay and federal minimum wage; productivity and average wage; the production and sale of oil and gas, poultry and beef, milk, sugar and coffee, rice, corn and wheat, soy bean, palm oil and cocoa are replicated on the rugs and tapestries in bright yarns on pieces of colourful fabric.
As seen in yesterday's post, Mika Rottenberg comments in her videos upon the value of a product, highlighting how its real value is in the actions that produced it and in the efforts invested in its making.
In the same way, Bajevic questions through these tapestries the concept of value, asking visitors what kind of value we place on the craftsmanship and other manual skills of her women artisans and ultimately using their traditional skills as a way to react to the relentless homogenisation caused by globalisation.
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