Darja Bajagić Montenegro, b. 1990

Darja Bajagić (b.1990 in Podgorica, Montenegro) was raised in Egypt and the United States. She is currently based in Chicago, Illinois, and Bogišići, Montenegro. 

Bajagić confronts us with challenging unrest, rendering works that are difficult to look away from and forget. By incorporating and contrasting tropes of western beauty with images culled from fan-gore, true crime, and dark web sources that depict acts of violence, nationalist undergrounds, religious iconography, and symbolism, she amplifies cultural tendencies towards brutality, perversity, and extremism—exploring contemporary moralism and theories of evil. The most unsettling aspects of her practice might not reside in its necromantic appropriated content so much as in the disciplined reserve with which she corrals the darkest of inclinations amid neither frame of reference nor any univocal interpretation.

Bajagić received an MFA from Yale University in 2014. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include: Forest Passage, Downs & Ross, New York (2022), Crucio, November Gallery, Belgrade (2022), Goregeous, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers (2020), Transfiguration, New Galerie, Paris (2019), Born Losers, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, US (2018), Unlimited Hate, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien (KM–), Graz (2016). 

Selected group exhibitions include HARDCORE, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023), Everyone is a Complete Disappointment, New Galerie, Paris (2023), Post-Digital Intimacy, National Gallery Prague, Czech Republic (2023), L’homme gris, Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’art contemporain (2020); When the time swirls, when it turns into a black hole, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2019).