Darja Bajagić Montenegro, b. 1990

Bajagić confronts us with challenging unrest, rendering works that are difficult to look away from and forget. By incorporating and contrasting tropes of western beauty with images culled from fan-gore, true crime, and dark web sources that depict acts of violence, nationalist undergrounds, religious iconography, and symbolism, she amplifies cultural tendencies towards brutality, perversity, and extremism—exploring contemporary moralism and theories of evil. Correspondingly, her stratified compositions draw attention to proscribed attitudes and prescribed reactions that her works elicit. The most unsettling aspects of her practice might not reside in its necromantic appropriated content so much as in the disciplined reserve with which she corrals the darkest of inclinations amid neither frame of reference nor any univocal interpretation. Galvanizing the limits of censorship and the ways by which we hold images accountable, Bajagić’s thanatic imaginary plucks at the tethers between atrocity and libidinal want while flagging the avenues through which communities distribute conflicting ethical traditions.