CHARLAMA PERFORMANCE
Jusuf Hadzifejzovic

Charlama Performance. 17 min
Sarajevo Zima 2005, XXI International Festival Sarajevo. «Closed far neigbours»

Following his studies in Belgrade and Düsseldorf, Hadzifejzovic came to prominence during the 1980s as a provocative performance artist. With happenings such as his “Artist Preparing for a Vernissage” or “Sleeping Through an Exhibition Opening” he targeted the public’s lack of interest in current art. Frustrated by the state’s art administration, which banished his own work as well as that of his colleagues to museum depots, he hit, in 1984, on his method, developed further since, of “depotgraphy.” Picking up objects found in the storage halls of museums and galleries, or at junk goods dealers, rubbish tips and by the roadside, Hadzifejzovic has been arranging and exhibiting these found pieces in new combinations in a spirit of Dadaist inspiration, albeit with sometimes drastic new interpretations - as in the case of the “Scarecrow Depotgraphy Bent Backwards”, featuring a woman’s dress pulled across a table, looking for all intents and purposes like a person dragged over a torturer’s wrack. Depots and city spaces serve Hadzifejzovic, in like measure, as large archives or misplaced containers of a cultural amnesia which he, like an archaeologically-trained psycho-analyst, raises once again to the surface of conscious memory.