During years of traveling across Croatia, I repeatedly found myself drawn to windows. At first, they attracted me as simple visual motifs, but over time I began to see them as boundaries between inside and outside, private and public, presence and absence. Even when photographed from the exterior, each window seemed to reveal something about the life behind it - about its inhabitants, the place, and the passage of time.

I was particularly interested in older windows set into wooden and stone walls, marked by weather, use, and age. Color, texture, proportion, and the traces left on their surfaces gradually became as important as the windows themselves. Rather than documenting architecture, I was recording small fragments of everyday life and the quiet character of places encountered along the way.

For me, each window became a kind of portrait - not of a person, but of a place and the life that had passed through it.

FROM THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Text by Ive Šimat Banov

“Even when looked at from the outside, a window is still the inner space of a being. And the original chastity of window shapes is retained by Maja's firm and disciplined eye. In every bit of her precise frames, she has kept the innocent cosiness of her motifs – those small or large openings in wooden or stone walls of raw and open color eroded by wind and fog – but could not hide the painful clarity that this once complete world is now becoming ephemeral. Her eye’s sensitivity and culture, as well as her subtle artistic purism have given each window being its personality and elevated it to a state of consciousness, if not to a threshold of metaphor…” 

The series consists of 40 photographs.

2002
Windows, Klovićevi dvori Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia Windows, Zlati ajngel Gallery, Varaždin, Croatia Windows, Mali salon, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia
Curators: Marina Viculin, Ive Šimat Banov, Biserka Smoljan Čerina