Maja Bajevic, Black on White, 1998, billboard.
Exhibition view: Obala Art Centre, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Curator Izeta Gradjevic), 1998.
| 64 apples | 28th part of a second |
| 459 kindergarden chairs | 36,500 invalids of war |
| 245 exhumated | 37 lizards |
| 3 steaks | 478 items |
| 17.003 million dollars | 2,945 raped woman |
| 48 pairs of shoes | 9 mosquitoes |
| 200,000 refugees | 896 spaghetti |
| 36 women | 5.5 promils |
| 1 envelope | 368 devastated houses |
| 10,000 missing people from Srebrenica | 839,021 Yens |
| 215 years | 73 shirts |
| 5 necklaces | 4 hairs |
| 8.17 sedimentation rate | 1 Anne Frank |
| 2856 ill | 49,000 victims |
| 4 mountain peaks | 231 paintbrushes |
| 123 corpses | 598 green pea grains |
| 86,500 ants | 6,720 died |
| 54 ashtrays | 22 cities |
| 36 percentages | 38 photographs |
| 1 shoemaker | 2 wars |
| 5 nails | 502 paper clips |
| 34, 563 potatoes | 7 glasses |
Description
Black on White
The main idea of this work is to make the viewer aware of the human incapacity for understanding numbers, especially when they are over 100 and dealing with tragedies. The numbers of victims, refugees, people who died that we come across in news every day do not mean anything to us anymore. They become almost as abstract and ‘harmless’ as a shopping list.