Mrđan Bajić (b. 1957, Belgrade) is one of the most significant figures in Serbian and former Yugoslav contemporary sculpture. Emerging in the early 1980s, he developed a practice that radically expanded sculpture beyond the autonomy of the object, bringing together constructed form, architecture, found materials, drawing, photography, collage and installation. Across more than four decades, his work has examined the unstable relationship between personal memory and collective history, particularly the ideological ruptures, political transformations and competing historical narratives that have shaped the Balkans and post-Yugoslav space.
Bajić came to international attention through major exhibitions and biennials beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He participated in the 8th Biennale of Sydney and APERTO at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and later presented his long-term Yugomuzej project at the 25th São Paulo Biennial in 2002. In 2007 he represented Serbia at the 52nd Venice Biennale with Reset_, the first autonomous presentation by Serbia as an independent state at the Biennale. Conceived through the interconnected projects Yugomuzej, Backup and Reset_, the presentation confronted the question of how cultural and political identities are reconstructed after the collapse of historical systems.
His work has been presented by institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Kunsthalle Wien, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole, National Gallery, Athens, Künstlerhaus Graz, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among numerous museums and institutions throughout Europe. In 2022–23, the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade devoted its entire five-level building and surrounding exterior spaces to Unreliable Narrator, a major retrospective tracing four decades of his work and identifying the architectural-constructive methodology of his sculpture, often described through the term “sculptotecture,” as a defining aspect of his practice.
Bajić has also developed an important body of sculpture in the public realm. Among his major projects is From There to Here (2019), created in collaboration with British sculptor Richard Deacon for the pedestrian bridge connecting Belgrade Fortress and the Sava riverfront, a work that functions simultaneously as sculpture, architecture and urban passage. Other public works include Star or Angel in front of the Nadežda Petrović Art Gallery in Čačak and Theatrical Sculpture at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade.
In 2015 Bajić was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, and in 2021 he was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lives and works in Belgrade.