Tanja Ostojic

14. Jänner 2010, 15.00 Uhr dokapi, Kollegiumgasse 2, 2. Stock

Crossing borders. Development of different artistic strategies

Tanja Ostojiç, born 1972 in Yugoslavia (Serbia), is an independent performance and interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She studied art in Belgrade and Nantes. Ostojiç includes herself as a character in Situationist performances and uses diverse media in her artistic research, thereby examining social configurations and relations of power. She works predominantly from the migrant woman's perspective and the approach in her works is defined by political positioning, humour and integration of the recipient.

In August 2000 she started the project "Looking for a Husband with E.U. Passport". After publishing an ad with this title, she exchanged over 500 letters with numerous applicants from around the world. She married one of candidates and got family unification visa for Germany on the base of it... 3,5 years later she organized "Divorce Party..."

In Linz Tanja Ostojic will present some of her most radical works from "Strategies of Success / Curator Series" (2001‑2003) project that is analysing power and gender struggles within the art system. Such as "I'll Be Your Angel" (2001) in which she escorted 49th Venice Biennale Director, Harald Szeemann the icon of curatorial power for four days; as well as from "Crossing Borders" series (2000‑2005) and "Naked Life" (2004‑2008) in which she speaks from the migrant women perspective.

Tanja Ostojic is a performance artist whose public interventions revel the increasingly conflicted status of the female migrant in EU countries. Beginning in 1999, Ostojic used her body to "perform the border" ‑‑ Prof Dr Pam Allara

The real scandal of her work lay not in its sexual explicitness, but in how it located sex at the centre of European politics. ‑‑ Prof Dr Judith Surkis

The expelled, the displaced, the ghettoised, the imprisoned, the immigrated, the war refuges and the Roma: all this marginalised and excluded people treated as "homo sacer" are subject of Tanja Ostojićs interest. ‑‑ Prof Dr Suzana Milevska

Recent Solo Exhibition:
2008 - Integration Impossible? Politics of Migration in the Work of Tanja Ostojic, Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck

The most recent group exhibitions and festivals include:
2009‑10
Gender Check, MUMOK, Vienna.
2009
The social Critique; 1993‑2005, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden
Agents & Provocateurs, ICA Dunaujvaros, Hungary
Les Femmes Parlent, Gandy Gallery & Goethe Institute Bratislava, Slovakia
(im)migrants within, Open Space & Erste Bank, Vienna
Performa, "Pandora's Sound box", White Box gallery, New York
Transmediale, "Transitland Europa", Institute Hungaricum, Berlin
2008‑09           
re.act.feminism, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

www.scca.org.mk/capital/projects/tanja/

www.van.at/see/tanja/