Tanja Ostojić: "Clothes, after Juniper Perlis’ »Clothes 1« and my mother ...", Video: Anne Quirynen Photograph: Jan Stradtmann
Tanja Ostojić
Clothes, after Juniper Perlis’s »Clothes 1« and my mother ...

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

Within the new, complex analytical performance, the Berlin based Serbian artist Tanja Ostojic is going to re-enact Clothes 1 (2003) of the Boston based performance artist Juniper Perlis (*1974). In Clothes 1 Perlis brought on her own to the venue all the clothes she possessed and tried hard to dress up. During her research Ostojić found out that Perlis’ family was homeless during her childhood and that she became aware of the weight of her own things. Perlis’ Clothes 1–4 inspired Ostojić to think about different phenomena that are closely linked to clothes, such as consumerism, accumulation, identity and homelessness. In this same performance she will tell an intimate story about her mother’s clothes in the transitional period of the former socialist Yugoslavia.

Format
Video Documentation

Document media
Performance

Issue date
2009

To be seen in
re.act.feminism - performance art of the 1960s and 70s today, Conference and Live Performances, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 24.1.2009 / 9pm