Anatomy of a Haunting

How are we to reassemble what has been forcibly erased? In Anatomy of a Haunting, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM Draught exhibition series, Maja Bojanić transforms the gallery into a space where absence is not an ending but a condition that continues to speak. Working across moving image, sound, projection, and installation, Bojanić constructs an environment that feels intentionally unstable. We discover figures as they emerge and recede, and the darkness of the gallery as it becomes as significant as what is illuminated within it. 

The projected image, particularly, operates between recognition and uncertainty. Its spectral colors and indistinct forms evoke the mechanics of early optical illusion while remaining firmly situated within contemporary technologies of looking. Bojanić understands that the archive is more than a repository of facts; it is also a structure of power, determining whose lives become legible and whose disappear from view. By introducing fragmented testimonies and alternative accounts into these absences, she creates a space in which history feels less settled than continually reconstructed.

The exhibition refuses to resolve this tension. Rather than illustrating an argument about historical violence, Bojanić allows the material qualities of the installation to make that violence perceptible as something that lingers. The work asks what it means to encounter a person whose presence has been administratively denied and what forms of care might exist within that encounter.

Curated by Kristjan Sedej, the presentation gives Bojanić’s work room to unfold without overwhelming its nuanced intensity. The sparse installation and careful distribution of image and sound encourage a more deliberate form of looking, one attentive to what appears only at the edges of perception. In this space, haunting becomes less a metaphor than a method. These ghosts offer a way of returning to what has been left unresolved, and asks what responsibility remains when the past refuses to stay silent and buried. —Charles Moore