*blumen* - künstlerresidenz : Andrijana Pajovic, Montenegro/Serbien

FEBRUARY - APRIL 2009:

The work of Andrijana Pajovic, photographer from Montenegro, focuses on the issue of how to create identity in a social context.
Two of her most recent projects, "Kids with Guns" (2007) and "My History" (2006), are centered around different forms of self-dramatization in order to explore the process of finding one's identity. In these projects, Andrijana Pajovic deals with the everyday reminiscences of her conflict-ridden past in the Balkans through photographs of children posing with their parents' guns. The artist constantly reflects well-known motifs from the history of photography. She joins those motifs with the impressions of her own surroundings. In so doing, well-known themes are re-interpreted without being simple imitations.
Andrijana Pajovic was born in Podgorica, the capital of today's Montenegro in 1979. Between 2003 and 2008 she studied Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts BK in Belgrade (Serbia). Andrijana Pajovic lives and works in Belgrade, where she has been featured in a lot of exhibitions.

from the series My History, 2006, C-Prints, 50x50cm

from the series Kids with Guns, 2007, C-Prints, 20x20cm

During her residency in Leipzig, Andrijana Pajovic will be going to develop a series of portraits entitled ‚Home and Garden'. In this series, common servants will be shown in the context of their luxurious work places. In these pictures, the gardener will be staged as the landlord and the maid will seem to be the owner of a hotel. Those deliberately glossy images, epetomes of role reversals, are meant to dismantle social hierarchies and distort them into their opposite.