Tanja Ostojic, Belgrade/Düsseldorf
Strategies for Success / Venice Diary / Looking for a Husband with EU Passport

"Provocation is a speciality of mine. My experience tells me that while art cannot quickly change social or political reality, it is important for art not to be apolitical." (Tanja Ostojic)

A small room furnished like a bedroom, one bed, three televisions displaying the project series "Strategies for Success" - ritual foot washings for curators. This production, commissioned by the House of World Cultures, is a continuation of her performance "I'll be your Angel", in which she accompanied the curator of the 49th Venice Biennale, Harald Szeemann, as a "female angel". In this performance she created ambiguous situations, portraying herself as a potentially scandalous artist and thematizing power structures in the art world: only curator Harald Szeemann was shown "Black Square on White", her pubic hair shaved into a square in homage to Kazimir Malevich, to have it acknowledged as an official contribution to the Biennale. At the opening of her installation she will read from the "Venice Diary", her documentation of the events in Venice.

"Looking for a Husband with EU Passport" is an interactive web project that thematizes gender politics and capitalism and describes the collision between isolation, poverty and the EU's policies of exclusion: to obtain a residence permit for Germany she posted her nude photo on the Internet in search of an EU citizen interested in marriage. A brief meeting in Belgrade was followed by the wedding as performance.

Tanja Ostojic, born in 1972 in Belgrade (Yugoslavia), is a performance and multimedia artist, now with a second domicile in Düsseldorf. She studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Belgrade and at the ERBAN in Nantes, France.

Tanja Ostojic, Belgrad/Düsseldorf
The Berlin Lab - Lecture Performance and Installation
Strategies for Success (Installation)
Opening: THU 5th of June, 20.00 h
(free admission)
Venice Diary (Lecture Performance)
THU 5th of June, 20.00 h
(free admission)
Looking for a Husband with EU Passport
(Lecture Performance)
FRI 6th of June, 22.00 h
Admission: 5 Euro

Kindly supported by Christian Lacroix

The other Lab participants:
- Ralph Lemon, New York >>
- André Lepecki >>
- Zoran Eric, Belgrade >>
- The Atlas Group / Walid Raad >>
- Junko Wada, Berlin >>