Darja Bajagić

Darja Bajagić comes from Montenegro and lives and works in New York City. She is the author of zines, collages, videos and sculptures, but her main medium of expression is assemblage that combines painting with printing on canvas. Her creative practice is based on appropriation. Bajagić collects images of women from niche pornographic and fetish-oriented websites, as well as sites dedicated to serial killers or their victims. The artist separates the images from their original context —the system of meanings used to interpret them — and places them in new compositions. The displacement of the images deactivates their sense, and by creating visual puzzles, Bajagić strives to make their individual elements more abstract and formal. Her goal is to create, potentially, a meaningless composition. The viewer is confronted with an abstract form, assembled from images of web-sourced female sexuality, pornography or violence. The work’s title suggests a series of associations and triggers concomitant emotions, and simultaneously shows that the meanings built around the images of femininity are quite arbitrary. In this strategy of neutralizing and displacing senses, Bajagić looks for moments of transgression and subversion. The abstract image presented at the exhibition evokes associations with action painting — only instead of paint, Bajagić she spilled artificial and cow's blood on the canvas. Its surface was previously printed with a text sourced from maniacnanny.com, a website that collected information about serial killers detailing their crimes, and including photographs from crime scenes. The fragment used is a psychological study of a man known as the ‘angry stalker’, a serial killer targeting female sex workers. In the text, partially camouflaged behind a layer of red paint, one can find a description of misogynist fears and the hang-ups of the eponymous perpetrator of violence.