MAJA ZECO

OBOJENA KLAPA - DIRECTOR/VISUAL ARTIST

Maja Zećo, born in 1987 in Sarajevo, is an interdisciplinary artist with an educational background across design, fine art and sound art. Early in her career, she collaborated with numerous sound artists in her role as a video maker and a VJ. In that capacity, she experimented with live video and digital and analogue video compositing. Since moving to the UK and completing her PhD, which explored the ways personal histories inform listening to soundscape, her work has been negotiating sound and performance practice through research, exhibitions and live performances.

For the last decade, Maja has been developing a sound field-recording practice that engages with places of complex socio-politics, including those marked by trauma, conflict, and environmental change. Through soundwalks, listening excursions often involving others, she is developing awareness of sound and listening in our everyday life. From the contested sites of energy transition in Scotland to walks in smaller towns in England, such as Corby and Huntly, and in London, Skopje, and Sarajevo, Maja aims to uncover the political agency of sound and the transformative power of listening. She published articles in Organised Sound and Journal of Sonic Studies. In 2025, she co-delivered a Listening Academy along with Brandon LaBelle and Verica Kovačevska on Crip Listening in Skopje.

Drawing on the practice of soundwalking, Maja develops moving-image works, exhibitions, and performances that further explore questions of individual agency in a rapidly changing world. Her recent work, Defend and Protect, consists of a walk through public spaces in a personal protective suit filled with 25 kg of soil, which emits the sounds of aerial military drones. The work premiered in Zagreb and was subsequently presented in Skopje, Haarlem, and Canterbury. In Dissoutions, she is embracing the creative potential of noise by using the traditional Bosnian string instrument, saz, and a hand-cranked air-raid siren, dressed in a costume that comments on orientalism and exoticisation that Bosnia is often viewed by. In her piece Overstrung, she works with her body and amplified piano wires, embracing the power of feedback, critically negotiating personal histories of trauma with the loaded histories of classical music.

Maja’s practice continuously grapples with the past through a decolonial lens and her interdisciplinary approach while creating imaginative, often sensory-intense visions of the future. She presents her work in public spaces as well as galleries, and translates performances into moving-image works and installations. She had her works presented across post-Yugoslav space and the UK, and as part of the group exhibitions and screenings in Austria, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands and Australia.