Jusuf Hadžifejzović, Shop of emptinesses

4–22 June 2018
artKIT, Glavni trg 14, Maribor, Slovenia

Jusuf Hadžifejzović, internationally acclaimed artist from Bosnia-Herzegovina, was born in 1956 in Prijepolje, Serbia. He completed the School of Applied Arts in Sarajevo, and graduated in 1980 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, under the mentorship of Professor Stojan Čelić. He pursued and completed his postgraduate studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, in the class of Professor Klaus Rinke.
He is one of the founders and initiator of the project »Yugoslavian Documenta«, as well as of the Sarajevo Biennial of Modern Art, which launched the 1980s local Sarajevo art community to the very top of the existing Yugoslav, and even world art scene. Since then, he has continued to be regarded as the most provocative Bosnian-Herzegovinian artist.
He works with installation art and »depotgraphy«, and recently also analytical painting. He has participated in numerous prominent international contemporary art exhibitions, from Berlin to Korea.
He is also one of the co-founders of the Ars Aevi Collection of the then-forming Sarajevo Museum of Contemporary Art. Today, he lives and works in Sarajevo and occasionally Antwerp.
Hadžifejzović is widely known as a performer. One of his most remarkable performances is Strah pred pitno vodo (The Fear of Drinking Water), which was performed first after the Balkan war at the Cetinje Biennial, and then later at the Charlama Gallery in Sarajevo that has been running under his management. In 2016, the performance was featured at the MIG21 exhibition in KIBLA PORTAL; the following year as part MIG21 on tour (within the frame of the Art Capital project) in Szentedre near Budapest, Hungary, and also at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. Both this year and last year, he has been artist-in-residence at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Celje, where his work was shown in a solo exhibition.

ABOUT EXHIBITION (PDF)

Presentation of the residency program will be on Friday, 22 June 2018 at 6 p.m.