EUROPE - LIFE IS SOMEWHERE ELSE

2011

"Maja Medić’s eye, objective but engaged, gifted but not determined, as it should be with the exquisite professionals, has caught a lot of the essential irony of this process. Ironic and alone, it poses question marks, not equality sign, in this historical transfer, and a subtle meaning of this irony is that there are non-European ethnicities and unclassified codes thriving in European centers, grouped on the other side of political strategies and on this side of life.

Whether it catches the variety of Orient in the heart of Brussels (Turkish part of town, its chaotic bazaars, diversity that remains a great unknown for European architectural grayness, or African rhythms, body language and human faces of the numerous African population on the streets, their relaxing nonchalance comparing to the administrative rhythms of the city, Maja Medić, once a citizen of Brussels herself, with rarely seen expressiveness and efficiency,  effortless, as if, with every shot, she’s annihilating the possibility of demarcation that would leave Europe on the other side of its own self-sufficiency.

Hence that powerful, exquisitely pin-downed black-and-white contrast in the Europe series that brings us closer to a different, synchronic Europe which is less obvious, but equally relevant and essential, due to its individual inheritance and its communication void, where city maps make drafts for a world without people..."
Miroljub Stojanović, from the catalogue