For more than two decades, visual and performance artist Maja Bekan has been exploring the idea of community and collectivity as artistic formats and their potential to inspire social change.
At the core of her long-term projects are delegated performances involving diverse social groups, through which she examines relationships and connections by introducing concepts of collective intimacy and the practice of togetherness. Bekan’s performances often focus on working with groups of women of different ages, professions, and life experiences. Within each newly formed community, she addresses notions of self-organization and self-empowerment, as well as care, friendship, and solidarity. In her work with collectives, Bekan employs performance (and dance) as a rhythmic form and process through which participants connect, exploring ways of jointly engaging with personal histories and truths, as well as social, political, and economic realities. The outcomes of these performance – or, more precisely, exercises in togetherness – prompt reflection on current models of collective action and on intimacy as a transformative force, both in the field of art and in a broader social context. For Bekan, this process of building unity, trust, and exchange creates space for the emergence and production of new forms of knowledge, establishing innovative relational, discursive, and participatory practices while questioning the boundaries between private and public life.
The exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade is conceived as an environment for several stage-like settings in which the artist, through different media (video, objects, text-based installations), presents approaches and strategies developed in collaboration with women’s communities: from women in New York who, during the Covid-19 pandemic, reflected on questions of connection, intimacy, and friendship in times of crisis, to participants who experience social exclusion and prejudice due to their lifestyles or professional activities, to women serving in the army, who, together with the artist, explore their gender roles and discover in moments of conflict the potential for emancipatory change. For this exhibition, Bekan will also include local participants into her project platform P for Performance – this time inviting high school students to engage in collective readings and explorations of the biographies of historically significant female protagonists, political and social activists, such as Dragica Pravica (1919–1942), revolutionary, WWII partisan fighter, and People’s Hero of Yugoslavia.
Maja Bekan received her MA from the Piet Zwart Institute in 2008. In the same year, she initiated her long-term project P for Performance – a method of staging situations and using performance as a tool for investigating collective intimacy and the productive space of new knowledge. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including at SMBA, Amsterdam; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Tent and Melly (formerly Witte de With), Rotterdam; ISCP, New York; Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Cultural Center of Belgrade; The Nunnery, London; IZOLYATSIA, Kiev; Kunsthaus, Graz; and the Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, among others. Her forthcoming monograph, Maja Bekan: Constructed Situations, will be published by Mousse by the end of 2025. Bekan is based in the Netherlands, where she is a tutor with the Performance Tutor Group at BEAR (Base for Experiment, Art, and Research), ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem.
The realization of the exhibition has been supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Stroom Den Haag.
https://www.mondriaanfonds.nl/
https://www.stroom.nl/