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Text by Tanja Ostojic During summer 2000 I did three works
embodying, with a bit of irony and (black) humor, the situation
of dealing with the World while being Yugoslavian passport
holder. Basically, this works show possible approaches in reflecting such
humiliating every day life situations. The first was Illegal border
crossing, which consisted of two simple
actions on Slovenian/Austrian border, which is the border
to European Union and where approximately 8-9 illegal person
are captured per day. For some administrative reason that is
useless to describe now, my application for EU visa in June
2000 was not taken intro consideration. In that time I was
living in Ljubljana. I actually, wonted to join informal
international, group of artist meeting/workshop, which was
happening in Austria. So, I decided to make small art action
and to join them. My both way illegal crossing became possible
because of huge help of my friends who came from Austria,
who picked me up in Slovenia and who guided me throw tinny
mountain roads to Austrian territory. One of them who draw
me by car throw small mountain road risked a lot. We were
equipped with detailed maps of territories we were going
throw and with small digital camera, we used for minimal
documentation of this event. It was exciting and still less
stressful then legal procedure that I went throw when I
got proper visa few weeks before when I had exhibition and
performance in Carintia. Waiting for a Visa took
place in front of the Austrian consulate in Belgrade during
August 2000. It was six hours queuing action, with
no result. From 6am until noon, I was standing in regular
queue with hundreds of other people, with about 20-document
papers and few guaranty letters, in order to get visa. Everyday
in Belgrade you can see the same picture, which is forbidden
to capture with photo or other camera, any season and almost
24h per day- people are queuing for visas. (Austrian, German
and Croatian consulates are the most popular ones, for the
reason of transit, tourist, business and other types of
visa). (Tanja Ostojic and Nenad Andric captured photos.) Finally, Looking for a husband
with EU passport, was an interactive
web project, still work in progress. I received and exchanged
about 500 very different letters initiated by my advertising
that I placed on the net. Some of the letters, which arrived
by January 2001, are available on www.cac.org.mk/capital/ostojic
Some magazines in Slovenia, Belgium, Holland
and Australia published this add too. After six months long correspondence with
German media artist Klemens Golf, which was also initiated
by this add, we finally met for the first time. I organized
this meeting as 60 minutes public performance that took
place on the grass field in front of the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Belgrade, 28. 11. 2001 at noon, with the live web
streaming on the net. On January 9, 2002, we got officially
married in Belgrade, and with international marriage certificate
I applied for permission to live in EU. This procedure takes
about 8 weeks. Next step is to get EU passport, and I hope
it won’t take more then 10 years to get it.
“While
using her own body within different cultural and social
contexts as a retort to various power-games Ostojic inevitably
entered the realm of "gender troubles". Her reflection
on gender issues is focused on the economic and political
phenomena that accompany the phantasm of European Community
that is shared by many Eastern European countries. In her
project "Looking for a Husband with a EU Passport"
she reveals and ironizes the truth about the traffic with
women, prostitution, pragmatic marriages and all other "side
effects" of transition. In such conditions the economy
of gendering is inevitably the economy of power over the
body. The self-irony of this project is contained in the
intentional aesthetics of artist's usage of her own image
for the Internet add: her skinny shaved body without any
traces of sensuality and seducing gaze or gesture conveys
completely opposite visual message. From this conflict of
the textual invitation with the visual repulsion was born
the gap of ambiguity between attraction and abjection.”……From
essay by Suzana Milevska
Photo: Borut Krajnc
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