Tanja Ostojic at MoCAB: how much strength it takes not to consent

In the first room of the Milica Zoric and Rodoljub Colakovic Legacy Gallery, an uneven row hangs along the wall as if a body had just passed through. White embroidered paper, shredded silk, two pieces of metal mesh, a photograph of a girl seen from behind. This is the opening segment of the retrospective of Tanja Ostojic, one of the most recognised contemporary Serbian artists with an international career, who on May 20 opened her exhibition titled “How Much Strength Is Required…”

The title is not rhetorical. It is a sentence that has appeared, in different formulations, in Ostojic’s practice for thirty years. How much strength it takes not to consent. How much strength it takes to remain in a country that is disappearing, or to leave it without losing one’s identity. How much strength it takes for a woman’s body to take back its own materiality from those who interpret it.

Material as a grammar of resistance

The curator Miroslav Karic has built the exhibition around the idea of materiality in Ostojic’s practice. Each segment of the retrospective takes a material as its point of departure: paper, water, hair, metal, food, milk; and traces how, across three decades of work, the artist treats that material as translation, not as symbol.

The most striking part of the show is probably the segment devoted to “Black Square on White” from 2001, one of the works that placed Ostojic on the global scene. In that photographic series the artist, with a shaved pubic triangle, posed the question of what makes the image of a woman decent or indecent, which at the time was one of the few Yugoslav responses to Western feminist thought of the 1990s.

What comes after

The retrospective does not stop at the early works. The following rooms follow later series, among them the cycle on economic migration, which grew out of Ostojic’s two-year experiment of marrying a German artist in order to obtain a passport. That work in 2005 sparked controversy in the German press, which itself became part of the piece.

The side programme includes:

• a two-day workshop, “Transformed by Water: a menopausal tea party with embroidery and swimming”, in the gallery courtyard and on the shore of Lake Sava
• several guided tours led by the artist herself
• a conversation between Karic and Ostojic ahead of the exhibition’s closing in September
• a catalogue accompanying the exhibition, with essays by several authors

Tanja Ostojic’s work over the last twenty years draws no line between theme and material; she uses the body, water and thread as the same expressive particles.

Karic’s curatorial text here sidesteps the usual map of feminist theory and tries to speak about practice.

Why now, why in the Legacy

The choice of the Legacy Gallery over the main hall of MoCAB is not innocent. The Legacy holds the collection of Milica Zoric and Rodoljub Colakovic, a space historically defined by modernism and the model figures of the twentieth-century Yugoslav cultural establishment. To place Ostojic in this environment means levelling her work with the canon, a move museums usually keep for after the artist’s death.

The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and the German institute ifa, which suggests the retrospective is not read only locally. In his concept, Karic insists that Ostojic is one of the rare contemporary artists from the region who has managed to bring post-Yugoslav experience into contemporary European debates without translating through explicit political language.

A room that returns

Visitors who walk in for a third or fourth time, as often happens with retrospectives, will notice that the show shifts around them. Not technically, but in the way they read it. The early room begins to speak of ageing; the later rooms, of a powerlessness in the 1990s we had not yet known how to name.

Is this an exhibition about one artist, or about thirty years that we lived through together and no longer know where we left?