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Maja BAJEVIC - KARAOKE (2011)

                                               curated by Francesca Referza

 

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Velan is pleased to present Karaoke, a solo show by the French/Bosnian artist Maja Bajevic curated by Francesca Referza. Karaoke is a four-screen video installation, based on the mixture of text and performance, present in popular karaoke. The first screen depicts a scene filmed in the poor quarters of Palermo, a family gathered, singing karaoke. The screen next to it shows the karaoke text that is also visible in the video. As they sing, the words appear on the screen, as is usual in karaoke. The third screen shows a scene filmed in Jerusalem, next to the Western Wall, of an exercise of the female part of the Israeli army. At a certain point, we start hearing a prayer from the Al-Aqsa mosque. This prayer is shown as karaoke on the fourth screen.

I first filmed the part in Palermo - explained the artist, who lives and works in Berlin, Paris and Sarajevo. - It was a situation of great inner beauty. We were passing by, after asking if we could take a photo, we were invited to join the party and warmly welcomed. It was taken in the poor part of Palermo. The big family, with all the family members, young and old, was having a party and singing karaoke, many more songs than only this one. I choose this song because some Italian and Albanian friends of mine were often singing it at different occasions. I call it a ready-made video since there was practically no intervention on my part, except for seeing and filming it. The second part, in Jerusalem, I took afterwards, also as a ready-made video. It was a situation that I encountered, next to the Western Wall. I did not ask for permission to film, as it is a public space, and nobody objected. The image with the female soldiers in Karaoke depicts a group of the Israeli army practicing maneuvers on the backdrop of the Western Wall. In the background, we hear the sound of a call to prayer from a mosque. The piece wants to show different facets of the world we are living in by combining things that do not necessarily fit together. The women soften the image we have of soldiers as a particularly disciplined group. They seem different and very relaxed. This seems to take away from the common image of the Israeli army as something dangerous. Yet, this army could just as well pose a threat to the existence of the mosque. There's something absurd in the way the two worlds overlap. The artist continues - I find that voices are, in particular singing, triggers and keepers of memories. A song functions like a smell, it brings us, like a time machine, back to the moment of memory. In Karaoke, I am using a very seductive, melodical song in a family context, juxtaposed with a political situation. I think the intimacy of the first situation makes the second situation stronger, although both are layers of the world that we are living in.

Maja Bajevic’s experience as an artist has often drawn on performance, sometimes involving small groups (often women, but not exclusively so) with whom to share, on almost equal footing, a path of reflection that the (social and geographical) context has activated. Maja Bajevic's work often compares private and group dynamics, calling into question the fragile, illusory ideologies that contemporary societies continue to propagate, at times unwittingly. However Bajevic never gives a personal interpretation of the questions she puts on the table. Instead, her work tends to underscore paradoxical aspects, to create short circuits of meaning that make the viewer have to think. The conclusions are to be drawn by each viewer in his or her own way. Bajevic's interest is in recatalyzing attention on aspects that as the somnolent consumers/TV watchers we are, we no longer even see as ‘critical’. In the work shown at Velan, the juxtaposition between Jerusalem and Palermo, through a playful, popular tool like karaoke, is inherently powerful. It is made all the more so by the characters appearing in Arabic and Italian, mirroring each other on the space's adjoining walls. Upon closer consideration, the physical spaces are psychologically inverted. Though the female soldiers are moving in a sunny, open square, they seem closed in by the very close and visible border of the Western Wall. In contrast, the space where the family from Palermo is portrayed, though indoors, is physically open to the street and in its domestic simplicity seems open and free. Or perhaps, in both cases, the surrounding environment serves as an invisible cage, like other metaphorical cages that Bajevic has built in reference to different themes and contexts? This is another mechanism implicit in the complex works that Bajevic orchestrates. Viewers are simultaneously actors and the performers are no longer unwitting participants, becoming potential creators of the work, asking us questions in their own right. The loss of orientation, at least in the traditional sense, is one of the artist's specific intents. With the very few ingredients of ready-made videos, popular music (a collective text in Arabic and a private one in Italian), Karaoke creates a sense of vertigo, intended as the start of a new, more aware way of looking at the context in which we are immersed, both the private and public ones. In an interview with Angela Vettese, Maja Bajevic said - Political society and private society are of great importance for me. This is why I submit them to such scrutiny....What have always interested me are the parts of society that we normally do not want to see. -

Shown for the first time in Italy at the Velan Center in Turin, during Artissima 18, in 2011 Karaoke was shown in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthal of Moen, Denmark, curated by Rene Block. It has already become part of the Vehbi Koc Foundation in Istanbul. We would like to thank the galleries Peter Kilchmann, Zurich and Michel Rein, Paris. The exhibition will run from November 3 to December 16, 2011 at the following times: Tuesday to Friday from 3:30 PM to 6:30 PM

Picture caption: Maja Bajevic, Silent Karaoke (2011), color photograph

 

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