Tanja Ostojic
«Personal Space»

«In this performance Tanja Ostojić has critically evoked spiritual visions of the body from the medieval spiritual tradition and combined two aspects: nuditas naturalis and nuditas virtualis. Her body, purified of bodily hair, covered by marble powder, has been transformed (being a tableau vivant) into an image as folding of the outside into the inside. The question is how such a static act (Tanja Ostojić does not move her body throughout the whole performance) manages actually to «perform».The body communicates through movements, and the lack of these body techniques suggests an agonising position that is monumentalised. This performance, being a tableau vivant, is not «only» a living sculpture (in the manner of 1970s art) but rather a living monument carrying in itself all the pomp and the historical symbolic weight associated with such gestures of grandeur. In a position where the beholder fixes his/her gaze on a body vulnerably exposed, s/he witnesses not only a mute statement of the indisposition of an artist to act within a hostile environment (for someone living in Serbia this carries the double weight of an internal/local and external/international isolation of a subject-in-opposition) but also discloses the wider image of woman’s body in art history as a sad affair of symbolisation and manipulation.»


(Branislav Dimitrijević, in: MANIFESTA 2, exhib. cat., Luxembourg, 1998.)