Maja Bajevic: The Matrix of Memory

Abstract

This paper deals with three performance pieces by the Bosnian artist Maja Bajevic, entitled Women at Work (1999–2001). The artist performed these works in public spaces, in collaboration with Muslim women who were war refugees from Srebrenica. The first piece Women at Work—Under Construction took place in Sarajevo (1999), the second subtitled The Observers was performed in a French castle (2000), and the last in the series, Women at Work—Washing Up was situated in women's public bath in Istanbul (2001). All three performances were delicately interlaced with Bajevic's inimitable politics of domesticity. In her solo pieces and those realized in cooperation with other women, her politics manifest through the public performance of diverse manual activities, such as embroidering, sewing or laundering. These habitual female proceedings, repetitive and monotonous, are carried out in public spaces so as to lay bare women's traditional activities for coping with absences. The theme of absence is at the core of Maja Bajevic's art. Most of her works relate to subjective “voids,” distances, digressions, separations and the plausibility of loss; they refer to absent “spaces,” the spaces that may have existed or have been imagined as homes or homelands.