Elena Bajo
Exhibition & Residency:
January 13 – March 28, 2014

Elena Bajo was born in Madrid (SP) and lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. Her concept-generated and research based practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. She works individually and collectively across installation, sculpture, painting, performance, participatory events, film, text and writing. She uses exhibition spaces as studios or laboratories where an experimental, itinerant, site-specific performed work can unfold, building improvised actions and choreographed movements. Using art production processes as her point of departure, Bajo works with places as they are given to her and is limited by the materials available in and/or around them. She rearranges these found elements into new compositions, juxtaposing the identities of prefigured social and political spaces and dimensions, creating a, sometimes, cryptic but always revealing new code of signifiers. Bajo presents to her viewers a re-staging of a space and time, of the past, into future events that uses chance, contingency and ambiguity of the moment.

Recent solo exhibitions La Femme Radicale or The Point of No Return, 2013, D+T Project Brussels (BE); The Absence of Work, 2012, Platform3, Munich (DE); The Factory of Forms, 2012, Manifesta Parallel, Genk (BE) and group shows Zero Hours, Art Sheffield 2013 Sheffield UK; Original Doubtat Plataforma Revolver, Lisbon; Throw a Rock and see what happens, Casa Encendida, Madrid; Vers une Hypothese Fort Du Bruissin Xll Lyon Biennial Lyon, Material Conceptualism at Anaant and Zoo Gallery, Berlin; Pacific Standard Time, LAXART, 2012, Los Angeles; Perform Now! Los Angeles 2010;Registered, White Columns, New York, 2009; Bread and Roses 101, University of Trash, Sculpture Center, New York, 2009.

She received an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, London (UK) in 2005 after obtaining a MA in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona in 2002. She was a co-founder of the temporary art project EXHIBITION, NY (2009). Her third artist’s book The Absence of Work has been recently released, published by Platform3 Munich-Edition Taube, Berlin.

Elena Bajo’s Artist Lab Residency at 18th Street Arts Center and all associated events have been made possible through the generous support of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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