The gallery is proud to announce that Darja Bajagić has been selected to represent Montenegro at the 60th International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Venice in 2024.
Her project, titled It Takes an Island to Feel This Good, curated by Ana Simona Zelenović and organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, will present a critical consideration of the culture of collective memory and our relationship to shared historical heritage. Through painting and sculpture, the artist will examine and reflect upon these themes, focusing on the complex and multidimensional history of the Montenegrin island of Mamula.
Bajagić has spent two years researching Mamula’s history, specifically changes in its rule and function, in Montenegrin state archives; this collected material serves as the starting point for the artist’s visual compositions. The iconography of the paintings will combine the aforementioned archival material with distinctive referential and symbolical interventions, characteristic of Bajagić’s work. Bajagić and her project correspond to and build upon the theme of the 60th Venice Biennale, titled Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adrian Pedrosa, in numerous ways:
- The very context of the Mamula fort is categorically linked to the idea of “foreign”, seeing as it was built by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, obtaining its present-day name after the general who oversaw its construction; converted into a concentration camp by the fascist forces of Benito Mussolini’s Kingdom of Italy during World War II and revitalized, beginning in 2016, with the assistance of foreign investments (via Orascom Development Holding, headquartered in Switzerland).
- The project raises critical and pertinent philosophical questions about the position of the Other, investigating how the determination of this position determines power relations in society as well as over discourse.
- The project concept rests on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s politico-philosophical analysis of modernity—that the paradigm and nomos of modernity is not the polis or other political structures, but rather the concentration camp: where the sovereign has complete authority over homo sacer—not only as a citizen of a state, but even to the point of acting upon his or her own natural life, depriving this individual of the right to live.
- The artist herself is a lifelong foreigner and “stranger” everywhere: she was born in Montenegro in 1990, moved to Egypt with her family that same year, and immigrated to the United States in 1999, returning to Montenegro in 2021—in fact, it can be surmised that the work of Bajagić is further complicated by this very biographical fact, seeing as it inherently encompasses various, sometimes dichotomous, artistic traditions and cultural legacies known to its author.
Seeing as Bajagić lives and works between Luštica Peninsula and Chicago, this project would present the art of a contemporary Montenegrin artist that already, at present, exists in an international context. The first national of Montenegro to graduate with a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art, Bajagić has achieved global art world acclaim in her nine-year-long career, having had three solo institutional exhibitions, fourteen group institutional exhibitions, and, in total, over one-hundred solo and group exhibitions in prominent galleries and museums across Europe and the United States. Represented by three galleries in New York, Paris, and Oslo, her work has been featured in over one dozen international publications, including the New York Times in 2022. Her work is in the collections of four museums across Montenegro, Spain, and the United States. Bajagić’s project, It Takes an Island to Feel This Good, would valorize the one-of-a-kind heritage site that is Mamula and utilize its remarkable presence as content to raise pressing universal questions that are significant to our time. Hence, it is precisely the project of Bajagić that is capable of notably highlighting and affirming Montenegro’s talent, relevance, and promise in the international contemporary art world context of the 60th Venice Biennale.
