MIS(S)PLACED WOMEN? METHODOLOGIES OF EMPOWERING FEMINIST ARTISTIC PRACTICE | Tanja Ostojić
27th September 2024
Diana Damian Martin, Supporting Editor of performingborders e-Journal #3 Entangled Practices: Embodying cross-border live art:
Tanja Ostojić reflects on over three decades of work with Mis(s)placed Women?, a long-form and long-term art project with contributions from across the world by over 180 participants with experience of displacement. Through shared reflections, an ethics coda and an offering of scores, the contribution entangles methods for cross-border collaboration with performative modes of exploring displacement as a means of unpacking travel, identity, questions of home and belonging, public and private space, safety and solidarity, united by a commitment to a collectively-shaped feminist politics of care.
Photo: Gülbin Eris, copyright: T. Ostojić
Tanja Ostojić (*1972 Yugoslavia) is a Berlin-based artist, researcher and educator internationally renowned as a pioneer of institutional gendered critique and for her art works in the field of socially and politically engaged art. Since 1994, she has been developing conceptual and research-oriented, performative art projects that deal with issues of gender politics, feminism, migration, displacement, labour and ethical participation. Most recent projects are centred around community building and grounded in collaborative practices, and methodologies of shared women knowledge.
In the frame of her current project “Changed by Water” she is organising workshops that combine swimming practice with conversations, gathering and transmission of knowledge among women, around the topic of swimming cultures as healing for menopause. As a feminist, Ostojić is committed to embrace the changes in her body as politics. Through artistic research, she is working on mapping out strategies to touch and change through bodies of water, and through women’s collective knowledge.
She studied at the Belgrade University of Arts and the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, and in 2012-14 she received research fellowship of the Graduate School, at the Berlin University of the Arts. Ostojić has presented her work internationally, such as the Venice Biennale, Performa in New York, Brooklyn Museum in New York, Busan Biennale in South Korea, and Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, among others.
In 2018, she published the Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić (LADA, London, 2018), a book based on transformative encounters derived from a women communal project, from the region of former Yugoslavia. Ostojić co edited Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, (with M. Gržinić, argobooks, Berlin, 2009) and edited Strategies of Success/Curators Series, (La Box, Bourges and SKC Belgrade, 2004), among others.
tanjaostojic.com