Dejan Kaludjerović to have residency and exhibition in Baku

YARAT residency, followed by YAY exhibition

YARAT is honoured to invite Dejan Kaludjerović, Vienna-based artist from Belgrade, into a residency in October 2014. The artist will stay in Baku for one month, after which a solo exhibition will be organised at YAY Gallery to showcase the body of work produced during the residency.

The artist will produce a sight-specific installation using large wooden cubes (a typical children’s toy) that have letters from all alphabets that have been used in Azerbaijan throughout its history. 

This work will be accompanied by a sound piece, where children - in their own words - are answering questions about political issues such as social exclusion and inclusion, about foreigners, language, war, money, poverty, cartoons, etc. (what it means to be a local, a foreigner, to be rich or poor, to speak a different language, what it means to be a boy or a girl).

The artist always tries to include children with different ethnic, social and cultural background in order to grasp as wide and varied social strata of the culturally diverse cities where the work is produced (Moscow, Belgrade or Baku). The artist tries to question both the ideological, cultural and socio-political patterns that are imposed onto the children through family, education, media as well as their reasoning about the mentioned subjects.

Another video installation will involve a young child reinterpreting 'Je suis malade', a French song originally sung by the Egyptian-born French singer Dalida.  The song the girl is singing has a theme that is inappropriate for her age and speaks about an unrequited love and a woman in great pain. The song’s lyrics  shows love sickness and paralysis it ensues and contrasts with the child’s performance, which amounts to an instrumentalisation of the quintessence of youthful innocence as if a child  was attempting to convey to us a product in a language and experiences foreign to her. This is in and by itself a subtle illustration of the pathology of our globalize consumerist society

Dejan Kaludjerović is an artist who works across different media. His work is mainly concerned with issues of responsibility and manipulation. He questions how mass media, educational systems or family contexts, influence society. His work explores the centrality of the image in the Western society, the obsession of the society with violence, the structure and mechanisms of capitalism.

He is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Vienna.  He studies in the class of Erwin Wurm at the Academy of Applied Arts (Vienna), and gained MA in visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in 2004. 

Kaludjerović’s work is part of many private and public collections, among others, MUSA, KONTAKT collection and Kunsthalle in Vienna and Salzburg Museum der Moderne. He has exhibited internationally at numerous solo and group shows in Europe, USA, Australia and Asia: Kunstlerhaus Vienna, Santa Maria delle Croci Ravenna, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 1stand 4th Beijing International Art Bienniale, Tokyo Wonder-site – Institute of Contemporary Arts, Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, Kunstpavillion Innsbruck, 28th International Biennial of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Kunsthalle Krems, 43rd, 44th, 45th, 46th International October Salon Belgrade, Museum of Modern Art Saint-Etienne, 2nd Bucharest Biennial of Youndg Artists,  Landesgalerie Linz am OÖ Landesmuseum, Linz, Prague Quadriennail and Manifesta 4, Frank- furt, Germany. His artistic practice reflects the interweaving of photography vs. manual painting, figures vs. background and perspective vs. inverse perspective. Furthermore, he’s exploring the dichotomies of hidden vs. revealed, spontaneous vs. constructed, past vs. present, personal vs. social, childish vs. mature, dangerous vs. harmless.