Mrđan Bajić’s sculpture begins from a fundamental distrust of coherent history. His work addresses history not as an objective sequence of events but as a mutable construction, a field of competing memories, ideologies, images and omissions through which individuals and societies continually reinvent their understanding of the present.
Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, collage and found objects, Bajić assembles heterogeneous elements into structures whose apparent material solidity is continually undermined by conceptual instability. Industrial fabrication may coexist with an ordinary object; architectural geometry with an anthropomorphic fragment; the monumental with the provisional, precarious or absurd. These collisions are not formal exercises. They establish a sculptural language capable of holding contradictory realities simultaneously.
The fragment is therefore central to his practice. Bajić does not attempt to reconstruct a lost historical totality from fragments, but instead accepts fragmentation as the condition through which history reaches us. Objects, political symbols, vernacular forms, images and personal recollections enter his sculptures as displaced evidence. Removed from their original context and recombined, they resist the authority of a single narrative. The resulting works operate less as monuments than as counter-monuments: structures that acknowledge the desire for historical meaning while exposing the instability of the systems through which that meaning is produced.
This approach became particularly explicit in Yugomuzej, developed between 1998 and 2002 and subsequently presented in Belgrade, Vienna and at the 25th São Paulo Biennial. Rather than constructing a museum capable of stabilizing Yugoslav history, Bajić created a deliberately subjective archive in which private memory, political imagery and collective mythology intersect. The project established a methodology that continues throughout his work: history is not represented from a position outside it; it is reconstructed from within its contradictions.
In Reset_ at the 2007 Venice Biennale, that methodology became spatial and architectural. The project brought Yugomuzej, Backup and a new group of large-scale sculptures into relation, producing a landscape in which artistic practice encounters political reality. The title itself, borrowed from the language of computing, suggested the possibility of restarting a system without erasing the information accumulated within it. For Bajić, historical rupture never constitutes a clean beginning; every attempted reset remains burdened by the memory of what preceded it.
This tension between construction and instability also defines what critics have termed Bajić’s “sculptotecture.” His works frequently borrow the logic of architecture, frames, supports, bridges, platforms, structural systems, while refusing architecture’s promise of stability or utility. The Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade has identified this architectural-constructive methodology as a crucial trajectory within his sculpture from the 1980s onward. The sculptures can resemble machines without functions, monuments without agreed subjects, or architectures whose purpose remains unresolved.
His public project From There to Here, conceived with Richard Deacon, extends this thinking directly into civic space. The bridge is not simply a support for sculpture: passage itself becomes the work. It joins territories physically while activating the historical and symbolic density of the site—the Belgrade Fortress, the riverfront, and the confluence of the Sava and Danube. Here, as throughout Bajić’s practice, sculpture becomes a way of negotiating relationships: between object and architecture, memory and history, individual experience and collective identity.
Bajić’s work ultimately refuses both nostalgia and historical certainty. Irony, discontinuity and visual incongruity operate as critical tools rather than stylistic effects. His sculptures do not tell us what history means. They reveal how meaning is manufactured, dismantled and reconstructed, and how profoundly unstable that process remains.