Red is the Coldest Colour.

Darja Bajagi and the Profanation of the Unprofanable

The unprofanable of pornography - everything that is unprofanable - is founded on the arrest and
diversion of an authentically profanatory intention. For this reason, we must always wrest from the
apparatuses - from all apparatuses - the possibility of use that they have captured. The profanation of
the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation.
Georgio Agamben, In praise of Profanation1

Confessional forms of staged sincerity and personal disclosure have become the quotidian experience
in our obsessively graphic Internet age. It does not come as a surprise then, that it is on Twitter where
camera-shy Darja Bajagi, posts snippets of text and images found online, hijacking and
recontextualising them as her own thoughts. Investigating uncharted territories of marginal web
communities and subcultures, Bajagic's unusual mood board accumulates images of gore, amateur porn
stars from Eastern Europe, lesbian vampires, missing-persons reports, erotic cartoons, Black Metal
cats, and the staple of her collection: hot women with tattoos, addictions, dental issues, bad skin and
criminal records. The artist rephotographs or scans these dark treasures, printing them on pieces of
canvas that are later incorporated into larger compositions. By layering various imagery on top of each
other she creates semi-forensic collage studies that are rooted in truth and artifice, where intimacy of an
encounter intertwines with obsession of collecting. Think of them as excavations or offerings, twisted
and oftentimes funny, but in the darkest of fashions.
Unlike Bajagic's tutors at Yale School of Art who in the past expressed concern for Darja's perverted
and promiscuous mind (calling her crazy and proposing to cover the counseling expenses), in this
text I wish to ask a question of a different sort. My aim is to attend closely to various aspects and
effects of violence expressed in Bajagi's art and ask whether they could be symptomatic of her search
of new models for representing and transgressing the body in the era of digital dematerialization.
Although Bajagi often distances herself from analyzing her practice from the ethical point of view,
and insists on taking a more formal approach instead, I am tempted to consider the artist's work in
parallel to the writings of George Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Pierre Klosowski, Camille Paglia and
other pioneers of mysticism and morality, who embrace violence on the path to moving beyond
violence. Because as Maggie Nelson aptly notes in her book Art of Cruelty, some of the most good
1
"In Praise of Profanation", in Giorgio Agamben,Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 92
intentioned, activist, compassionate art out there can end up being patronizing, ineffective, or
exploitative. And of course vice versa: much of the work that has no designs on eliciting compassion or
bringing about emancipation can be most salutary, the most liberating.2 I am interested whether this
could be true of Bajagi's art - just how much compassion may her ambiguous and anxiety-producing
practice elicit.
The work in question presents a set of formal and psychological associations that frame recurrent
tensions around power and gender and speak to our ever-evolving relationship to images: online,
offline, in between. It considers a type of contemporary image encountered on the Internet, and seeks to
- through both mimesis, as well as recontextualization - explore its deactivated state, and, in turn, its
potentiality for whatever use. Through exaggeration of exposure and shameless self-portraiture of the
subjects she choses to represent, Bajagi practices what Georgio's Agamben calls "pure means" in
relation to profanation.3
Consider one of the artist's earlier works such as the video Tanya versus Irena, which exists together
with a series of accompanying paintings. The video includes photographs that Bajagi purchased from
a man on the Internet who sells his pornographic imagery in collections, from which she bought one
entitled "2,900 images of Sexy Russian Women." In this collection, there were fifteen folders, each
titled with a common Russian name, which for all we know could be placeholders, false identities.
Most of the folders contained standard-type photographs of single girls posing, but one was an
anomaly, containing a set of photographs of two girls Tanya and Irena - playing strip poker. Bajagi
says of this series: I wanted to create a video to share this break in the product (the collection I
purchased), and, simultaneously, through the backgrounds of the video that displayed Tanya and Irena
in similar-to-identical poses, speak of their anonymity, sameness: their images as empty, in fact, and as
"pure means," again - as formal devices, carriers, for new meanings, uses.4 The artist describes this
brand of provocation as blank, however not to negate these womens unique contexts and histories, but as
Franklin Mendez has suggested, to underscore her own mode of re-presentation that leaves them open to
new and unexpected encounters with fresh viewers. 5 In her goal to strip the image from its immoral
surface and to accelerate deactivation, Bajagi focuses on various modes of circulation and
iconographic regimes that govern the audiovisual capitalism. One cannot help but notice that the
photographs of Tanya and Irena whilst gaming are presented via an effect that mimics cards being
shuffled, or thumbed-through. With this gesture invoking human touch, the artist brings forth the
2
Maggie Nelson, Art of Cruelty. A Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), p.9
3
Agamben, ibid. 76
4
Darja Bajagi, RE: Dear Darja Message to Natalia Sielewicz. March 7, 2014. E-mail
5
Franklin Mendez Unlimited Hate. Text accompanying the exhibition of the same title at Kunstlerhaus Halle fr
Kunst & Medien Graz. Curated by Sandro Droschl. 11.06.2016-08.09.2016
complex and unresolved relationship of tactility that we have with images online. Can you touch a
digital image? Can you caress it? Can you cum on it ? (In one particular series of her artworks Bajagi
studies a peculiar fetish, which involves printing photographs from the Internet, in this case of the
American-Ukrainian actress Mila Kunis, ejaculating on it, and re-posting it online).
Preserved and catalogued as frozen gestures, motifs and patterns, Bajagic's artworks are suspended
in space and time, and oscillate between embodiment and disembodiment like the images of the girls
that she first encountered on the computer screen. Just look how fragile they are; shrouded in veils of
mystery and (in)decency, at times her paintings seem like at the verge of falling apart. It is safe to say
that Bajagi reveals herself not just as an artist-archivist, but an artist-curator, who safeguards her
numerous archives character and cures the powerlessness of the recorded photographs of their
impotence to show themselves, by themselves.
As Boris Groys reminds us, one can perceive curating as a supplement, an ambivalent pharmakon in
Jacques Derrida sense of this word, which both cures the image and further contributes to its illness.6
The artists employs here a certain kind of iconoclastic violence, which accompanies the
deterritorialisation of the original from its site, when photographs return to a gallery as ready-made
objects when, in fact, no material traces are left behind in the digital space. 7The pharmakon can also be
understood, subversively, as a domination of the despotic archive over a vulnerable person of the
archivist and the Internet flaneur. The archival impulse to preserve the debris of life beyond death
reveals here its own cruelty and futility. Never quite selfsame, a disorienting pharmakon signifies both
a remedy and poison, the cold comfort, to invoke the title of Bajagi's solo exhibition at Room East in
New York. It remains unclear who is the victim and who the torturer: is it the pragmatic, scrupulous
female arkheion or the tyrannical archive, an empty grid waiting to be filled with memories, tales and
madness? Gilles Deleuze once wrote that only the victim can describe the torture, whilst the torturer
necessarily uses the language of order, authority and power. 8 Caught in a cycle of self-control, the
torturer does not try to prove anything to anyone, but wishes to perform a demonstration that is
necessarily related to the solitude and omnipotence of the author. However calm and logical they might
be, the process must be exercised in cold blood, and condensed by this very coldness, the coldness
of demonstrative reason.9

6
Boris Groys Politics of installation in e-flux Journal no.2 01/2009. A version of this text was given as a lecture at
Whitechapel, London, on October 2, 2008
7
Compare with Boris Groys Art in The Age of Biopolitics. From artworks to art documentation in Art Power
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008). p.54
8
Gilles Deleuze Coldness and Cruelty in Masochism (New York: Zone Books,1991) p.17.
9
Deleuze, op.cit, p.29.
 In her ghost story for adults Bajagi surrounds herself with specters and shadows, trails and traces of
the missing girls, virgin suicides, shedevils, pale russian teenagers playing strip poker, modern witches
and violent outcasts remaining in us and with us as forgotten. She confronts the basic mode of social
conduct which assumes that shame, guilt or even plain embarrassment have become the key emotions
in our everyday interaction, be it online or offline. And perhaps more importantly, she forces the
viewers to become complicit in the gaze, and more self-aware through the forced responsibility for the
act of looking.
But whose gaze exactly? Central to the artist's practice is the scopophilia which celebrates the
plurality of gazes the predatory gaze of the artist who is a female, the mischievous self-objectifying
gaze of women depicted in the work, and the gaze of spectator who is thrown out of their comfort zone
and forced to take the side and responsibility for their voyeurism. Things get complicated even further
if we assume a female audience, and start thinking of undisguised representations of female desire. As
we will see, the widely celebrated paradigm of gender power asymmetry as a controlling force
constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, is no longer a necessary given in Bajagi's case. At this
point it is relevant to bring up the classic text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura
Mulvey who analyzes two central forms of gaze that stem from Freuds concept of scopophilia, as:
"pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction and scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic
identification (the introjection of ideal egos)", in order to demonstrate how women have historically
been forced to view film through the "male gaze".10 The woman is usually displayed on two different
levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film and for the spectator who is watching
the film. According to Mulvey, the categories of pleasurable viewing are twofold: voyeurism, which
derives pleasure from viewing a distant other, and projecting ones fantasies, usually sexual, onto that
person, and narcissism, a form of recognition of ones self in the image of another we are viewing.
The female protagonists of Bajagi's artworks stare back at the viewer with a penetrating judgement
and confidence rather than vulnerability, as if they do not intend to comply with the spectator and their
desire. With the looks of indifference and inexpressivity these passive girls destabilize and frustrate our
gaze. I am specifically not limiting my description to the male gaze, for let us consider the scrutinizing
gaze of a female viewer or a patronizing conservative gaze that is gender neutral. To quote Agamben
again "in the very act of executing their most intimate caresses, porn stars now look resolutely into the
camera, showing that they are more interested in the spectator than in their partners." In the case of
Bajagi's accomplices, it is difficult to say in whom they are interested exactly. With their mournful

10
Laura Mulvey "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" in Screen. Oxford Journals. 16 (3): 618.
doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6
withdrawal, precarity, Eastern European otherness and self-objectification they seem to contradict the
neoliberal promiscuity and merry consumer feminism of Spring Breakers and Sex and the City.
In one particular example, the series of artworks entitled Ex Axes, where a violent object becomes a
carrier of violent imagery, Bajagi crops depictions of seductive women taken from a weapon fetish
website and prints them on hatchets. In this bizarre variation of a peephole show the artist amplifies
Lacanian formula for fantasy, by using the faces of women as ornaments, partial objects separable
from the rest of the body. In the world of immediate gratification where women are perceived never as
a whole, but always as collections of separate parts, this joke is on the viewer. But this kaleidoscope of
partial objects is also a body without organs, crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, used against
primal human instincts and apparatuses.11 The ax cuts through our desire with a ricochet. The gaze of
the girls is thus liberating. It is an entryway, of a different sort, into the image. In the words of Bajagic,
it's almost like a new life. 12
The artists is inspired by these levels of translation, both manifested and implied and always
attempts the matter at hand with a dose of black humour (just think of her collage depicting a profaned,
almost violated face of Natalie Portman called I am invisible. Only assholes can see me). But Darja's
work is interesting not only because of what it says about how womens own gaze might be interacting
with the male gaze, but because of what it says of how women view themselves. One of the reasons
physical appearance can be so potent as a bonding mechanism between women is that women see
themselves in other women. Perhaps it is also the reason why so many heterosexual women become
aroused by watching women in porn, not just men or male-female scenarios. Women see the image of
sex itself as being inherently tied to their bodies as objects of desire, including their own desire.13

In the past Bajagi constructed various identities and started relationships with men on social media
using the likenesses of sexy women. In response to why she seldom reveals her own face and body on
the Internet and as a subject of her work, Bajagi says: I prefer the focus to be placed on the artworks,
including the girls in the artworkstheir faces, their gazes. Somehow, they seem more representative
of me. There is more of me to see in them than in me.14 Yet her work moves far beyond narcissistic
identification and builds up a surplus of contradictory emotions and impulses for spectator. There are
certainly some moral lessons to be learnt here. Is the fact that something is perceived as vulnerable
bound up with an urge to protect it or to destroy it? Can we resist oppressive structures through
11
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari Anti-oedipus (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 19
12
Natalia Sielewicz Living your unlived life.Interview with Darja Bajagi in Mousse #47, 2015, p.188
13
Compare with Autumn Whitefield-Mandrano A Tentative Exploration of the Female Gaze in New Inquiry, December
5, 2013
14
Hans Ulrich Obrist Futura 89+: Darja Bajagi. Interview in Issue #24 Spring/Summer 2015
passivity ? Does the profane gaze of the girls invite violation or is their desire threatening to our own
desire ? Can we emancipate ourselves by staging withdrawal and self-objectification or are we just
internalizing the male fantasies of women as victims? Perhaps these questions will always remain
unresolved, safeguarded by the mysterious and tight-lipped heroines of Darja Bajagi's art.