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 The diary that she kept during the time remains unpublished: Szeemann prohibited its publication.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
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abstraction
activism
aggression
aging
appropriation
authorship
be-coming
beauty
body control
body object relation
cabaret
capitalism
childhood
collectivity
conflict
consumerism
craft
dance/choreography
de/construct identities
death
desire
destruction
dis/ability
dis/appearance
dreamscapes
durational performance
exhaustion
extended body
failure
fashion/glamour
femininity
flesh
fluxus
fragmentation
gaze
happening
health/illness
his/herstory
housework/carework
human/non-human animals
in/visibility
inscription
institutional critique
intimacy
labour
language
laughter/humorous
lecture performance
manifesto
masculinity
masquerade
mass media
maternity
measuring
metamorphosis
migration
military
music
mythology
nationalism
nature
networks/affiliations
normativity
pain
painting/drawing
participation
patriarchy
pleasure
pop
post-communism
precarity
private/public
public space
queer
queer/drag
racism
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resistance
ritual
roleplay
score
sexual violence
sexualities
skin
sound
state oppression
stereotypes
the common
therapy
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touch
trash
violence
voice
voyeurism
vulnerability