Darja Bajagić

Book excerpt: For her first solo museum exhibition, New Yorkbased emerging artist Darja Bajagic (b. 1990) turns to the murky terrain where real and staged violence bleed into each other with an ease that is both unsettling and alluring. Published on the occasion of her 2016 show, this slender softcover catalog, Unlimited Hate, presents a practice that spans painting, photography, collage, video and installation in full-color illustrations with texts by curators Alissa Bennett, Franklin Melendez and Natalia Sielewicz. Following the lure of the fringes, the artist culls her imagery from fan-gore magazines, true-crime TV shows, fetish websites, obscure online forums and hidden chat rooms tucked away in the darker reaches of the Web. She handles these disparate source materials with a dose of humor, working them into densely layered compositions that are at once confrontational and poetically fragile. Bajagic explores loaded questions of embodiment, viewership and power relations, all the while interrogating our need to hold images accountable.