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As per Ana Ereš, in her recent paintings Maja Djordjevic explores the notion of fragility by exposing the naked figures, the persistent protagonists of her painterly fabulations, to the scenography of fictional imagery developed in reference to the idea of the theatre of memory. Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived the ‘Theatre of Memory’ project in the 16th century as an ideal architectural structure that would spatialize the human knowledge of the world. His design replicates the structure of the antique theatre whilst reversing the relationship between stage and audience by placing the spectator on stage, exposed to the memory of human knowledge arranged within the auditorium construction. Taking this shift in relationship of exposure between the perceiving subject and the objectified memory as an impetus, Djordjevic sets her alter-ego figures in theatrical situations where they perform as both vulnerable subjects and objects of the artist’s personal recollections.
Maja Djordjevic’s painterly procedures are linked to the techniques of digital image making in a simple drawing software, so popular among children during the 1990s, which she often used and played with while growing up. One could say that her early formative painting experience stems from the doodles and sketches she made in MS Paint as a specific form of pictorial diary she kept as a young girl, keeping the intimate memories alive as jpeg or tiff files. The immediacy of transposing real everyday experiences to ephemeral digital images formed the basis of a particular autobiography performed by the doodle-like characters of young girls and boys who appear as main actors and narrators in her paintings. The ‘Theatre of Memories’ she creates within the exhibition space therefore appears not only as a stage for exposure of fragility in terms of contemporary bodily experiences, distressed and decomposed through technological mediations, but also as a sort of dramaturgical confrontation with personal memories, fears and hopes.
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Maja Djordjevic, "Roses, I love you so much! Thank you, you were so helpful!", 2023
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As Djordjevic persists in painting canvases camouflaged with rasterized computer graphics and installed as objects in the exhibition space, a certain paradox between the digital and the material image making is generated, which re-questions the notion of painting’s medium specificity. It appears as an ambiguous commentary the painter makes on our contemporary world of uncontrolled, endless and often chaotic circulation of digital images, where everything has already been seen and exists in an eternal scroll: if the painting can’t beat this, it should join it. In such a state-of-images, the painting is being exposed to the challenge of absorbing and appropriating the mechanism of rivalry image production modes in order to maintain its vitality. Maja Djordjevic finds in fragility the resistance of painting to re-establish the relevance of its practice. Or, as the two bodies taped on the bed floating across the sea scream in her painting: Fragile together, always and forever!
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Maja Djordjevic | Theatre of Memories: Dio Horia Gallery is pleased to present Maja Djordjevic’s ‘Theatre of Memories’, a solo exhibition featuring an exciting mix of 8 free-standing paintings and 6 video works by the Serbian artist, on view at Dio Horia Acropolis.
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