Chris Korda and Darja Bajagic exhibit in Paris: two critical views of right-thinking

by Ingrid Luquet-Gad
Published on April 19, 2019 at 5:00 p.m.

In Paris, Chris Korda and Darja Bajagic, artists from different generations, invoke two liberating explorations of the zero degree of the image between the pitfalls of criticism and celebration.

Two months after September 11, Chris Korda exhibited his video I Like to Watch in a Boston gallery. A four-minute clip format video, mixing two types of extracts: images seen a thousand times of the fall of the towers and others which seem just as familiar from the standard repertoire of pornography.

Accompanied by an electro-house track which would be released on Null Records a year later, the video is captivating, even enjoyable. Normal: Chris Korda combines the two most effective types of images, both pornographic in the sense that they leave no room for interpretation. They cannot be deciphered, they are experienced. They do not speak to the intelligence, but to the primary emotions.

For Chris Korda, early awareness of the ecological crisis

For Chris Korda, the video is not intended to convey a criticism of media society, but on the other hand harbors a perverse fascination with the large-scale emasculation of America – he himself defines himself as transsexual. This video is visible at the exhibition that the Parisian project-space Goswell Road is currently devoting to the archives of the work carried out by Korda since 1991, and which ended up becoming inseparable from his person: The Church of Euthanasia (L'Eglise de l'Eglise Euthanasia).

The Church, of which Chris Korda is the reverend, is a religious organization whose four pillars are: suicide, abortion, sodomy and cannibalism. These doctrines in fact have their source in the early awareness of the ecological crisis.

The only way to avoid global warming and the reduction of biodiversity? Let the man disappear. From the 1990s, the Church carried out actions in the streets, appeared on national television, and sold T-shirts, pins and car stickers which sold like hot cakes.

For Darja Bajagic, a micro-history of the former Yugoslavia

Around the same time as the Church was founded, Darja Bajagic was born. Born in 1990 in Montenegro, the artist had to flee her country in the wake of the Yugoslav wars. At the age of 9, she arrived in the United States, grew up between dark goth-gore fanzines, detective series on television, pornography and early internet chats, then entered the prestigious school of art school at Yale where she studied painting.

At the New Galerie in Paris, she is exhibiting a series of new paintings that extend the work that made her known. From a repertoire of images that she extracts from their circulation circuits, she reproduces motifs representing porn actresses (Dominno, a recurring Czech actress in her work) or portraits of missing children (here, deported children during the Second World War).

She blurs these motifs by adding other obscure iconographic symbols, like those of a Slavic neognostic sect active in the Middle Ages. In a certain way, we read a micro-history of the former Yugoslavia captured by its informal image networks, those whose circulation is ultimately, once again, the most effective.

Two artists who challenge the dualism of morality

Chris Korda and Darja Bajagic don't know each other. They are not of the same generation, and their operating methods differ. For the first, who, in the city, works as a computer programmer, the total infiltration of all spheres of reality leaves doubt between reality and performance, activism and absurdity – whatever the intentions, the fact is that it takes , the Church has members and receives state subsidies.

At the second, it is – and judging by its latest paintings, this is increasingly the case – a painting company. If the images are taken and recontextualized, they are done within an environment which reintroduces them into the time of contemplation: the artist scans or rephotographs the source images, prepares his canvas with acrylic and reprints them on top .

Rather than reading them within their media environment, we look at them in all their ambiguity enhanced by frame effects, pixelation and material.

Both reject the dualism of morality. Both reaffirm the exhibition space as the space of doubt, of contrary emotions and, above all, that where the learning of critical reflexes is experienced against the falling asleep sown by the sand merchants of right-thinking.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.