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Spiritual square Personal space was the first
significant project with which Tanja Ostojic reflected the
legacy of avant-garde, radical performance and body art,
focusing at the same time on the artists inner being, space
that it occupies and its psychological dynamics. It came
after a series of classical objects modeled in regular geometrical
shapes with the accent on the formal qualities of materials
like bronze and especially stone. The process of work on
marble sculptures comprised contemplative, dedicated shaping
and polishing to get to the perfect surfaces emphasizing
the textures, veins of the material. Nevertheless, more
important than aesthetical perception of the objet d'art
was the need of the artist to canalize her energy and express
her mood and inner processes in the material form. The further
necessary step in this development for Ostojic was to start
using her body as a medium of expression and it almost appeared
that in her performance she absorbed the firmness and motionless
of the marble. Standing on the square of white marble dust,
her body emanated an solemn space of inner calmness reserved
for the artist, evoking on the other hand the 'auratic'
space of Malevich's Suprematism. Her work was at the same
time introvert and extrovert - while trying to mark a private,
even intimate space, she was exposing herself, her naked,
shaven body to the eyes of the viewers. To claim the right
for the impenetrable personal space which determines artists
identity, she needed to enter the silent communication and
dialogue with the audience. Once established this ambivalent
shifting between the dichotomies of inside / outside, introvert
/ extrovert, private / public, will keep appearing in her
further project and in this case is best expressed in the
statement of the artist: When I deal with the stone,
I start from its inner structure moving along towards its
surface texture. When I work on my own head I move from
the outside to the inside. I fall deeply into the space
of my own spirit. So what is physical remains only texture
of my surface. The performance Personal
space, was first presented at the Biennial of Young Artist
held in Vrsac, in 1996 , in the time when Serbian society
just passed the period of most severe isolation due to the
sanctions of UN. The circumstances under which artist worked
were underlined as the paradigm of the art in the closed
society where the most frequent strategy was withdrawal
from the social sphere and dedication to the introspective
work and reflection of the aesthetical issues in art. The
mid-nineties were crucial phase when some of the most prominent
Serbian artist started to shift the emphasis of their work
towards more critical and engaged reaction to the socio-political
frame that was so strongly determining the conditions in
which they worked. In this context, Ostojic's project was
one of the rare to take a more radical statement, though
still in the frame of artistic problems that had strong
heirs in the circle of conceptual artists formed in the
Students Cultural Center in Belgrade in the 70's, Marina
Abramovic being one of the globally most acknowledged. Without
any doubt the need of the artist working in the economically
collapsed and torn by wars country was to define her own
position, her own identity and her own attitude towards
the social reality. However, as the artist claimed the dynamic
of this work was above all interior. With the standpoint
to make always strong statement with her work, one small
step was needed to get from the realm of introvert meditative
treatment of her body into its more engaged placing in the
social and political sphere. The work of Ostojic from this
point had started to engage more actively with the issue
of blurring and crossing of the social, political, economic
boundaries. Social square Another segment of the project
Personal space was the photo album done with Sasa Gajin.
It recorded the different inscriptions of the square onto
Ostojic's body, from white positive and black negative on
her shaved head to the shaved square on her Venus Hill.
The same black square of Malevich reappeared again in projects
Black Square on White and I'll be your angel conceptualized
for the Biennale of Venice in 2001. Taking up the role of
the escort, a "guardian angel" of the curator
of the Venice Biennale, Harald Szemann Ostojic again used
the twofold strategy. She was exposed all the time to the
audience, actually got all the public attention being constantly
au pair with the "most wanted and desired" person
of the Biennale but another part of her project, the Malevichs
square on her Venus hill was reserved just for the sight
of Mr. Szeemann. Through the lens of area
of feminist theorizing on women in urban settings, the exposure
of feminine body to the gaze of man was one of the key issues
for criticism. For Susana Torre the construction of bourgeois
femininity in the cities of nineteenth-century Europe was
exactly based on the fact that women are seen as extensions
of the male gaze and as instruments of the emerging consumer
society and its transformative powers at the dawn of modernity.
The right spot to problematize this context in the artworld
would be exactly the Venice Biennial whose constitution
coincided with the growth of the Modern bourgeois societies. Ostojic deliberately uses
her body to position herself exactly to the place reserved
for the women in the way social hierarchy is expressed in
the public space. If she was not bound to the premises of
secret privacy of the home, she should be in the shadow
of the dominant powerful figure of man, finally as his accompanying
person or escort. When playing her role she used all the
prerogatives of women's seductiveness, wearing haute couture
dresses by Lacroix, high heel shoes, and assuming lovely
and charming attitude in addressing the public. With this
role Ostojic became present in ceremonies, press conferences,
cocktails and parties, even the subject of gossips of the
untouchable elite that gravitates around the artworld and
witness of its power games. One aspect of this artistic
position was that it offered her the possibility to transgress
the pyramdically disposed strata of social status within
the artworld, and put herself right onto the top, a place
hardly reserved for an artist, especially from her region.
She appropriated the position that symbolized the prerogative
of power, and was marked always by exclusion and restriction.
In this situation, to paraphrase Torre, she took the most
effective standpoint to construct herself as transformative
subject, altering the perception of all participants of
the world of art on the ‚space of public appearance'(term
of Hanna Arendt) and placing her own persona and finally
her artwork itself into the glamorous elite circles, even
more so, making them all part of her performance. To assume
and construct an identity of this kind it is essential to
define your own space and experience it. Interesting problem
here would be that while in modernism the universal subject
excluded women, in poststructuralism underlying of otherness
women are often given the role of the means of constructing
the identity of the men. Taking up this problem it can be
said that Ostojic managed to reverse this situation and
to use a men, and indeed the person in charge - the curator
of the Biennial Mr. Szeemann, to construct her own (artistic)
identity. The same situation from
the performance Personal space, with the artists body naked,
shaven in the still, static position offered a new reading
in the project Looking for the husband with EU Passport.
This ongoing work started as an interactive web project
with an online advertisement from Tanja Ostojic where she
declared the quest for the husband with EU passport. With
the act that made public Ostojic's idea to transgress the
given political constrains to the individual having non
EU passport, the former 'physical' body inscribed in the
personal space gained connotation of the social body communicating
to the broad audience on the web. She used her body as a
mediator, a tool for questioning and rising issues in the
public sphere. Her naked body made public was deliberately
presented without seductiveness and sensuality in the bare
physicality of her flesh, taking a position of written invitation,
but visual repulsion , and was thus performing the role
of the political message. The constant shifting between
dichotomies like private and public that was noted as one
of the main characteristics from the beginning of Ostojic's
work, finally appears in the performance Crossing which
took place on the lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Belgrade. This was the site of her meeting with German
artist Klemens Golf, who was the chosen one from many 'candidates'
to respond to her advertisement, and with whom she had a
six month long correspondence. This first encounter of Tanja
Ostojic and Klemens Golf was public and it lead to the secret
and private wedding. With this act the project entered another
and more challenging phase where all the possible problems
appear: from bureaucratic and administrative regulations
of the German country regarding the non EU wife of the German
citizen, to interpersonal relations between two artists,
two projects that crossed their paths, and finally the interpersonal
relations of the legally bound "married couple". Interesting document of
this ceremony, and the project itself, offered the official
witnesses, the artistic, but also married couple Jelica
Radovanovic and Dejan Andjelkovic. I would consider taking
into account another perspective like certain body of feminist
theory that set as a target for questioning the classical
distinction between private and public and tried to disrupt
the idea of a centered subject, and which was highlighted
in the famous feminist slogan the personal is the political.
The strategies of those feminist theories is to critique
the limited definitions of gendered space and to deconstruct
the separate spheres of the polarized binary term male/female.
They elaborate on the idea of Derrida to expose the ways
in which binary systems function only through positive and
negative reference to the dominant category. The first step
in this process of deconstruction would be to reverse the
binary terms so that the one occupying negative position
in a pair replaced the one in the positive, which could
be here seen in the project that criticizes and deconstructs
the mechanisms which exclude and marginalize women from
public life. Regarding those theories it is possible to
finally empahsise again that the work of Tanja Ostojic could
be seen as continual alterations from the disposed 'negative'
to the 'positive' position with the aim to deconstruct and
transgress the given gender, social, political constrains. Zoran Eric
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