Tanja Ostojić
I’ll Be Your Angel

Tanja Ostojić is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgrade who lives and works in Berlin. In her provocative performances, she investigates the position of women in contemporary cultural and political power regimes. She uses persiflage, provocation and irony as strategies of exposing and subverting the exclusionary mechanisms of European immigration policies and hierarchies within the Western art world. She employs her own body as artistic material, transforming herself into a social (artificial) persona with unique, socially embedded experiences. In her interactive works, she engages in direct dialog with her audience. In a series from 2000, she followed female immigrants as they enter the EU by different means – crossing borders illegally, waiting for visas or hunting for husbands with EU passports. In the years 2001-2003, Ostojić worked on the series "Strategies of Success / Curator Series", which consists of performances, installations, photographs and a journal, which shed light on the power games played by curators and artists. Her long-term project "Misplaced Women?" has been running since 2009. Her research project "Lexicon of Tanja Ostojić" (2011-2017) has been widely exhibited.

artist's website: tanjaostojicshop.wordpress.com

In I’ll Be Your Angel Ostojić accompanied the curator Harald Szeemann during the opening of the 49th Venice Biennale, never leaving his side. Part of her contribution to the Biennial was also her conceptual body art work Black Square on White (2001), in which her pubic hair was trimmed in a square, and which was kept hidden from the audience. The diary that she kept during the time remains unpublished: Szeemann prohibited its publication. “This piece, integrated in everyday life, poses potential ambiguous narratives concerning the scandalous artist (and the curator). It provokes an invitation/invasion, and questions the power structure in the art world. Speculations of morality, and art world strategy will spin out.”

Courtesy Tanja Ostojić

Format
Performance documentation

Document media
Video, colour, English subtitles, 22:00 min

Issue date
2001-2002

Tags
fashion/glamour, femininity, institutional critique, migration, roleplay, stereotypes