Maja Zećo (Bosnia-Herzegovina / Scotland): Discomfited Futures
curated by Jon Blackwood (text by Jon Blackwood: Discomfited Futures)
Institute of Contemporary Art,
Trg kralja Tomislava 20, Zagreb,
24 October 2024.
at 7:00 p.m.: Performance: Defense and Protect
The performance starts at 19:00 in front of the Institute of Contemporary Art and takes place on the street and in the park on Trg kralja Tomislava
at 8:00 p.m.: Artist’s Talk
at 8:30 p.m.: Opening of the exhibition
The exhibition remains open until November 16, 2024.
Opening hours of the gallery: Tuesday – Saturday: 13:00 – 19:00
The gallery will be closed on Friday 1 and Saturday 2 November 2024.
This is the first solo exhibition of the sound and performance artist Maja Zećo in Zagreb, curated by Jon Blackwood. Zećo hails from Sarajevo but for the last ten years has been living and working in Scotland.
Zećo’s practice traces the interstices and overlaps between performance, sound and moving image. The exhibition is a selection of work made in the context of Scotland which opens out these nuanced relationships. Her work has always had a strong performative grounding, as can be seen in Grains of Sound (2016), where the artist was buried in a tonne of soil, emerging over time.
The relationships between sound and performance develops further in the ongoing piece Silencer (2018-present), featuring a suit made of the type of sound-damping material normally found on the walls of radio stations. This innately sculptural material encases the artist as she interacts with audiences in public spaces, recording all the sounds and dialogue that she encounters via binaural microphones. This is an ongoing relational piece that has been performed in several cities between Aberdeen and London, drawing on themes of displacement, discomfort in public space, and the range of audience interactions from bewilderment to humour.
If Grains of Sound and Silencer draw on a sense of displacement and a diasporic sensibility, In Search of the Sun problematises the legacy of modernism and the vexed problems around global migration, in response to climate change. Commissioned by Aberdeen Art Gallery in response to J.D. Fergusson’s modernist portrait bust Eastre : Hymn to the Sun, Zećo’s inhabiting of the character of Eastre- a golden goddess figure of transnational qualities- opens out the limiting imaginaries of colonialism and maps them onto their contemporary mutations in response to migration, drawing on the artist’s own diasporic experience, and critical response to the movement of people caused by climate change and conflict.
The renewed presence in the news of war, and the devastating images seen from the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the Nakba in Palestine, underpin the newest pieces: the sound installation and performance piece Dissolutions, first shown in 2022 at Summerhall in Edinburgh and performed in July of this year at the Historical Museum in Sarajevo; and the new performance piece Defend and Protect. This partly relates to the erosion of our common expectations of being kept safe by the state, and to a peaceful life, coupled with the urgency to prepare for our common discomfited futures, ourselves.
In summary this is an exhibition which covers very troubling contemporary problematics in challenging, inventive and sometimes humourous ways. Expect the unexpected!
Maja Zećo, originally from Sarajevo and based in Scotland since 2015, is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance art, sound and moving image. In her research-oriented work, she explores themes of identities, decoloniality and ideas of Balkan futurisms. The critical exploration of these themes have led Maja to self-burials, diving into water to recall memories, sensory impairment experiments, and endurance practice. She completed a practice-based PhD in 2019 and has presented her works across the UK and internationally, including London, Corby, Leicester, Lincoln, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Aberdeen, Zürich, Sarajevo and now Zagreb.
Jon Blackwood is a writer, educator and curator based between Aberdeen, Sarajevo and Skopje. An art historian trained at the University of St. Andrews and the Courtauld Institute of Art, university of London, he has since held various university posts and has been an active researcher in the ex-Yugoslav space since 2006. Previous exhibitions have included Property of Emptiness : Jusuf Hadžifejzović (ISU Zagreb 2015), Captured State (Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2017), Utopian Realism : Mladen Miljanović (Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, 2019) and Nothing’s Guaranteed : Exhibition of Bosno-Futurism (Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2022). Jon is the author of several books and essays on art from the former Yugoslavia and is currently working as co-editor of two anthologies to be published by Routledge in 2025: Yugoslav Hauntologies (co-edited with Jasmina Tumbas) and Contemporary Art from Bosnia-Herzegovina (co-edited with Irfan Hošić & Claudia Zini).
Image: Maja Zećo, Dissolutions, installation & performance, 2022, Summerhall, Edinburgh
Support: Grey’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University