Maja Marković
Maja Marković was born in Zagreb in 1979. She graduated painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Art education department, in the class of Prof. Ante Rašić. She received several awards and nominations for her work: in 2007 she was nominated for the Radoslav Putar award young artist award given by Institute for contemporary art, 2008. she was nominated for Vijesnik’s award for vizual arts Josip Račić, and in 2009 she received award from Croatian Association of Artists for the best young artist in that year. She was artist-in-residence in several places: Kultur Bunker, Frankfurt; 2013. BMUK Artist in residence, Kulturkontakt, Vienna. Since 2007 she is continuously exhibiting on solo and group shows. Marković is Pogon’s artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude for 2014.
In Stuttgart she is exploring the artistic and theoretical implications of the concept of home (or its fictions) which from this perspective, can be viewed as experienced space, existing in the mind and as meaning-charged activity. The project that she intends to focus on “Fourth wall” will be research based exploring the concept of home/place that is not a fixed product, but a dynamic place, a living process or construction. The home signifies not only a physical place but also represents a centre of activities, source of identity, belonging from the past, a goal for personal and social development, an abstract state of being, and a legal concept. The importance of home is brought to the forefront in instances of disruption, loss, upheaval, and trauma in people’s lives. A home is neither wholly absent nor present, shaped by many factors including the personal, temporal, physical, social, economic, cultural, and political, and marked by presence and absence in various ways. In part this interest stems from her own personal experiences derived from the several accidental events during the 1990s where her family, due to unfortunate coincidences, were left without house and a possibility to live in the space built by her family. This work deals with a relationship between a house that was and is no more and a house that was never there.