After classical training in ex-Yugoslavia, Maja Bajevic entered the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1991. Forced to stay in Paris during the Yugoslav Wars, she experimented with performance and video, representative of an exiled, and later traveling, artist’s experience. When she returned to Sarajevo in 1998, cultural life had been partly revived by Dunja Blažević, founder of the Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art (SCAA). M. Bajevic realised performances and videos concentrating on the political and social situation left behind by the war. The Speaker, a performance from winter 1998, was a parody of an electoral campaign. In a 2001 video, Double-Bubble, the artist pronounced contradictory sentences amplified with an echo, “I go to church, I rape women,” heard by the fanatics of the three monotheistic faiths. These themes of identity cross over with the feminine condition.

In her performances and videos, women maintain their social role by perpetuating, for example, ancestral gestures in the face of the destruction of history. At the Istanbul Biennial in 2001, the videographer, accompanied by two Bosnian refugees in a hammam, washed fabrics upon which Tito’s slogans were inscribed until they were reduced to lint (Women at Work – Washing Up, 2001). M. Bajevic’s latest works have revisited exile. Le Voyage (2006) alternates between the perspective of the city of Casablanca in which a man walks in the streets, head down, and scenes from the film Casablanca, thus opposing two immigrations. This feeling of confinement linked to marginality reappeared in Vertigo (2007).