Irena Lagator Pejović
— born in 1976 in Cetinje is an artist, art theorist and an associate professor at the University of Donja Gorica in Podgorica. Her artworks have been exhibited internationally since 2000 and are included in collections of public institutions such as the FRAC Marseille, France; Villa Pacchiani, Centro Espositivo, Santa Croce sull’Arno, Italy; MCAM of Montenegro; MoCA Belgrade, Serbia, and Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; the Museum of Money in Belgrade and the National Museum of Montenegro. She represented Montenegro with the solo exhibition Image Think at the 55th Biennale di Venezia. Lagator is one of the seven awardees of the UNESCO prize for the Promotion of the Arts that was awarded at the 4th Cetinje Biennial in 2002. Among other awards, she received the award of the 24th Memorial Nadežda Petrović in 2007. Her artworks have been the subject of notable exhibitions such as the 4th and 5th Biennials; the 12th Istanbul Biennial; the 3rd Biennial of Industrial Art in Croatia; The Sea is my Land held at MAXXI Rome; La Triennale di Milano and FRAC Marseille; the 18th Tallin Print Triennial; Art at Work: At the Crossroads Between Utopianism and (In) Dependence, MoCA, Ljubljana; and Collections for a Solidary Future, MoMCA, Slovenj Gradec. A book about her artistic practice, The Society of Unlimited Responsibility: Art as Social Strategy, edited by the Neue Galerie Graz, was published by Buchhandlung Walther König in 2012. Most recently a comparative study of selected works by Irena Lagator Pejović and Christine de Pizan was published in a book by Monika Leisch-Kiesl under the title Two Cities: An Aesthetic Approach to Ethical Responsibility, with an introduction by Miško Šuvaković and afterword by Elke Krasny, published by Verlag fur Moderne Kunst Vienna, 2024.
In my practice as an artist, I understand the ethics of artistic responsibility as based on the possibilities of developing solidarity, sharing, commonality and compassion. My post-media practice is research and process-oriented which is why I frequently collaborate with art historians, scientists, and architects. I’m interested in unnoticeable and paradoxical situations, linguistic and systemic constructions of our globalized age, which seemingly appear irrelevant. By analyzing them, as well as the relations between images and language, individual and collective experiences and responsibilities, I create rhizomatic references for critical understanding of contemporary society and culture, showing that art can be a relevant social activity for shaping our common future. Addressing pressing matters of our time concerning the environment, biopolitics, system instability, memory and history, my artistic practice deals with issues of social responsibility and solidarity and their visibility and functionality in everyday life.1 By prompting the audience’s participation and empathy for those topics, I’m interested in sensitizing and engaging reflection upon structures and systems that are shaping our lives and senses, while pointing to the possibilities of overcoming their limitations and limitations of paradoxes of Modernity.2
From the beginning of my artistic practice, the upheavals of the 1990s in the region of former Yugoslavia have interested me and challenged me to understand the role of art as that which can take over the function of light in times of social and political crises. I was born in 1976 and grew up in socialist Yugoslavia. The education and culture I received there, and the county’s decentralized, multiethnic and multicultural socialist politics and system were particularly formative and influenced in my decision to devote myself to the field of culture. As an art student in the 1990s and during the start of my professional artistic practice in the first decade of the 2000s especially through witnessing and participation in editions of Cetinje biennials of contemporary art, I closely followed my county’s transition from socialism to neoliberalism and noticed important nuances in differences between the old and new systems. From the present post-transitional perspective, now that we can observe how the public sphere has changed during times of transition, through my practice I understood that certain cases of Yugoslav art and architecture deserve a closer analysis.3 Looking to past examples helps to activate a critical understanding of the present in relation to cultural heritage and knowledge production that is relevant for shaping inclusive and anti-colonial future. In my installations, drawings, photography series and objects, I’m interested to develop a critique of the existing capitalist society of limited responsibilities through the lens of the spread of unrestrained neoliberalism in the territory of former Yugoslav state socialism and socialist modernism. Through the process of developing a postulate of a possible society of unlimited responsibilities, this critical questioning of our constructed reality is based on the intention that the subject discussed hopefully fosters and renews the concepts of solidarity, togetherness, and compassion in the current, more than troubled times.
Some of the guiding questions for my quest over the years were addressing the processes that make an unlimited responsibility society possible, and whether the artistic responsibility could also be unlimited, that is, response-able? I understand artistic responsibility as a social and aesthetic practice that relates to the world in which it is created via its critical understanding and decoding of the structural centres of power, the one that works with the development of the culture of the capitalist system in a critical sense i.e. as the critical friend that every system needs. Unlimited artistic responsibility4 in my practice gives priority to discursive and contextual knowledge over profit, equality over subjugation, criticism over suitability. Therefore, I’m interested in art as a means for making visible what is not immediately apparent, but also exceeding the making visible and intervening with care in the societal realm. If the defense of critical thinking and imagination in the arts for its ability to be an active participant in the development of an ethical-political awareness, sense of urgency and shared citizenship in any given space, is taking place, then we might speak of the art of unlimited responsibility – a kind of practice that is in a constant state of relation, immersion and rehearsal of interconnectedness, that manifests itself in knowledge creation, a process that we can also understand as artistic research and relational ethics.5 Tied to others, our shared sense of the environmental and more-than-human worlds, it quotes from everyday social life and transforms those quotes in critical, poetical and ethical-aesthetical language. This kind of art understands the polyhedron of relationships between: the artwork and the audience, the representational and institutional tactics, the way in which we can find possibility through bio-culture to live in right reciprocal relationship to the soil and land. The art of unlimited responsibility participates in offering answers about our transient society via the discussion, description and recovery.
1Writing, archiving and research are a parallel practice to my artistic one. One important research that I conducted between 2005 and 2012 is the research in the meaning and consequences that a legal economic term SaRL – Société à Responsabiilité Limitée or LLC/Limited Liabilty Company is having on citizens all over the globe. Please read my essay Doxa and the Paradox of the Limited Liability Company (Society)
2See my essay The Society of Unlimited Responsibility
3 Decisive to my artistic practice is artistic research and theoretical comparisons. For relation between art and architecture in my artworks and textual production read the essay Maximum Profit-Minimum Time https://post.moma.org/maximum-profit-minimum-time/
4Image: site specific, work in public interest; apartment building, open shutters, 10 color prints, each color print: 180 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lazar Pejović.
5For further details about the artworks that are products of my research please see my essay A Diary of Ceaseless Quest for a ‘Society of Unlimited Responsibility’
6Image: Limited Responsibility Society, supermarket till rolls - copies of customers’ original receipts, dimensions vary according to setting Text: Ilaria Mariotti, exhibition/venue: Società a responsabilità limitata (S.r.l.), Limited Responsibility Society (L.L.C.), Villa Pacchiani, Santa Croce sull'Arno (Pisa), Italy. Curated by: Ilaria Mariotti
Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Abati.
7Read my recent research essay The Monument is on Google Earth: link.
8Image: Limited Responsibility Society, Automatism, 4 columns: 68 paper citizen´s bill rolls with textual intervention by the artist; LED light, sound, visitor´s interaction; dimensions: 420x400x700 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ivan Petrović.
8Image: Nets, Nodes, Horizons, process oriented, interactive installation, hand-made spools of 14m long multi-coloured threads, nodes, metal nets a workshop at the dismantling of installation providing working hours for people in need 105x620 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ivan Petrović.
9Image: book-object, a book made of 1,650 devalued banknotes from 1992.
33.4 x 18.5 x 6.5 cm; Exhibition/Venue: Exhibition/Venue: Irena Lagator Pejović, Expanses of Love, Art Gallery „Nadežda Petrović”, Čačak, Serbia, curated by Patrycja Rylko and Julka Marinković, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Ivan Petrović.
9Image: floor installation, fragments of broken facade glass from the same architectural facility in which the work is exhibited
30x200x200 cm; exhibition/venue: Night in Montenegro and Other Stories, Art gallery “Miodrag Dado Đurić“, 13. November salon, National Museum, Cetinje, Montenegro Curated by Petar Ćuković. Conversation between Toni Hildebrandt and Irena Lagator Pejović, This Is Not a Landscape Any Longer. In: Monika Leisch-Kiesl / Franziska Heiß (Hg.), Was sagt die Kunst? Gegenwartskunst und Wissenschaft im Dialog, [transcript], Bielefeld, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Lazar Pejović.
