TANJA OSTOJIĆ

Be My Guest, a 120 min performance took place at the course of the exhibition opening “Gravita 0” at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome where Ostojić staged a dinner with Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (exhibition curator) inside the gallery space. After, as she announced in her letter, she took a bath in the jacuzzi that was, just as the dinner table, food and drinks, installed inside the exhibition space for this occasion. Not long after, the art critic Ludovico Pratesi joined her in the bathtub. The audience was watching live this menage a trois with drinking champagne and flirting inside the jacuzzi, Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly in interpretation of Maria Callas was playing. Performance was simultaneously filmed and later edited to 16 minutes video, that is a part of the Strategies of Success/Curator Series installation.

Strategies of Success/Curator Series (2001–2003) is a conceptual art project that focused on the relationships of power and gender within the art system, analyzing how gender operates within power structures and how economies of professional, and professional & private merge and interrelate. The work offered a pioneering institutional critique of artist-curator-art critic-institution relationships in the context of “East and West”, across the division of the Global South and Global North. It included the following performances, conceptual body artworks, photos, collages, videos, etc.: Black Square on White (1995/2001), I’ll Be Your Angel  and Be My Guest (2001), and in 2003, the following four works: Sofa for Curator, Politics of Queer Curatorial Positions: After Rosa von Praunheim, Fassbinder and Bridge Markland  (with M Gržinić), Strategies of Success installation and Vacation with Curator.

After Ostojić had been invited to take part in the exhibition she sent the following formal letter of invitation to the curator of the show:  

Dear Mr Pietromarchi, 

You are cordially invited for a refined, civilized dinner for two at the exhibition space in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. For the special evening, you and I will enjoy delicious Italian foods and fine Italian wines served by Italy’s most affable waiters. We will talk, we will discuss, we will smile, we will exchange personal and discrete items about our lives. Dinner will be followed by desert and champagne. Afterwards, I suggest we take a relaxing jacuzzi bath. Your role within the performance will be both natural and relaxed. I promise, not to push you to do anything you do not wish to do. You are free to come and be my guest, and of course, free as well to take leave. But I hope you will stay and watch a special screening shown for this evening.  

With warm regards, Tanja Ostojić

_{^{Organized by Fondazione Adriano Olivetti.}}