16 Nov 2010

Elena Bajo: The Object of a Movement at D+T Project, Brussels

D+T Project presents The Object of a Movement / Is Music the Essence of Words?, Elena Bajo's first solo exhibition in Belgium.

Having as a point of departure art production processes, and focusing on precise moments of disrupture and change, Elena Bajo has created new site specific works that reflect on the fragmentary, ephemeral and disjointed nature of time.

The new works exhibited at D+T Project Gallery have been produced in their entirety in Brussels, with materials found in different places where the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of an art product normally takes place: the Flea Market, the Art School and the Framer Shop. These found and overlooked materials are re-arranged into complex compositions. The works are not 'merely' installed, but 'performed' using the gallery space and its different forms of memory. The works are like traces of a series of performative gestures collaged together that form a choreographed dynamic of individualized narratives.

Fundamental elements of her work are issues of power distribution and non-hierarchical forms of organization. She experiments with form and context as anarchist practice. Her works are not only deliberate rebellions against commodity culture of pure exchange value of capital but are also reflective of value in an alternative economy ruled by a non-linear logic in which reused objects are understood as agents in networks directing flows of content. These reused objects which have been discarded at the end of their lifetime, become revivified in a reconfigured symbolic universe of her own making, that constitutes her 'revolutionary cosmology'. The objects become 'revolutionary objects' and the act of deviating them is an act of resistance.
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This art work made of revolutionary objects, moves away from the society of entertainment and exhibition, along with its overproduction and over consumption. Bajo resucitates the outcasts of a capitalist object oriented market system to breath new life into them according to a different logic. This is her statement and is the power of her art work. The reconfiguration of that which was and is yet to become again.

In recent shows at the Woodmill in London (April-May 2010) and at La Salle de Bains, in Lyon (June-July 2010) she presented 'Is Music the Essence of Words', a sculpture around which her pieces are staged and evolve, pieces created in Brussels, especially for this exhibition at D+T Project Art gallery.

Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1976, Bajo holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London and an MA in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. Selected exhibitions, The Woodmill, London; La Salle de Bains, Lyon; Solyst, Skulpturenpark, Denmark; Galeria Umberto di Marino Naples (2010); Perform Now! Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles; White Columns, New York (2009); Sculpture Center, LIC (2009); Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), FAR, Fabbrica del Vapore e Careof, Milan; co-edited the issue 2 of INPUT Journal, NY and was one of the founders of the project EXHIBITION, New York (2009). Future shows include Extra City, Antwerp and ICI, New York.