photo series
The Personal Space photo series (17 photos) was shown for the first time in its entirety at the exhibition:
– Personal Space, Tanja Ostojić and Saša Gajin, Gallery 12+, Belgrade, 1996. and at:
– Tanja Ostojić: Body, Politics, Agency.. Skuc gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2012.
The Personal Space photo series is the result of a one-year long processual body art work and collaboration of the artist Tanja Ostojić with hairdressers from IN Salon Belgrade, Predrag Jovanović and Slobodan(ka) Petrović Bobo, as well as with photographer Saša Gajin. New hairstyles were created at regular intervals, from one to two months, as long as it took for one segment of hair that was used for one work on one’s own head to grow and outgrow the previous one, so that the circumstances were created for the realization of a new painting/sculpture/hairstyle, that functioned in a very communicative way in everyday life. Namely, as a reason to start a conversation, and people also enjoyed touching Tanja Ostojić’s head, to experience her hairstyles and her artistic work in a tactile way. So, the photos were taken approximately every two months, in series of four each time (except for the last one, which is one, alone). Each segment of the photo series was shot in daylight in Tanja Ostojić’s studio at the sculpture department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. The structure was square: en-face, left and right profile, and the back of the head were always photographed. These were analogue black and white negatives of a square format. The entire photo album was published in the catalog of the exhibition Lični Prostor/Personal Space, Tanja Ostojić and Saša Gajin, Gallery 12+, Belgrade, 1996 with texts by Ostojić and Gajin, as well as in the Athens magazine Arti with an accompanying text by Dr Nikola Šuica.
In 1996, the artwork Personal Space existed in three medial registers: black and white photographs, performance and sculpture. It merges the intimate world of Tanja Ostojić, with the public side of her existence formulated through everyday public communication, symbolically provoked by works on the head, i.e. at regular intervals (how long it took the hair on the head to grow) by changing “extravagant” hairstyles. The basic motif that runs through the whole time is the square: the square as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ of the hair on the head, as a square of black-dyed hair on the light background of the rest of the hair, a square of pubic hair, shaped on the mount of Venus, a square of marble powder on to whom Tanja Ostojić stands during the performance, the square base of the sculpture in the form of a parallelopiped with an ‘inscribed’ square (carved parallelopiped, square base, filled with unfixed marble powder, created in the carving process) based on Malevich’s Suprematist composition: White on white, around 1918, as well as the square format of the photos. The photographs record four positions of the face and body (each offset by 90° from the previous one): en-face, left and right profile, and the back of the head, so that each of the four series of photographs has a square layout. There is only one deviation from this arrangement: there is one photograph (square format, of course), a close-up of a square, moved from the head to the pubis, almost as an homage to Courbet and Malevich, as a discreet eroticization of a spiritual sign, as a permanent subversion, conscious to unconscious and vice versa. They are stylized elements of behavior and performance.
And just as a white square remained in Vršac (dimensions 5 x 5 meters) with “traces of her presence in the white marble dust on the floor”, so is the aforementioned sculpture in one of the versions of Personal Space (Gallery 12+), a trace of her absence, future that for Tanja the very act of carving had the value of a performance realized through researching the internal structure and external texture of the material, as inhaling and collecting white marble powder during the realization of the sculpture, as a personal and bodily investment. (…)
( Dr. Jasmina Čubrilo: “Etre une artiste” in Profemina magazine, no. 21-22, Belgrade, 2000.)
Some of the Personal Space photos were shown at: Gender Check, MUMOK, Vienna, 2009./ Gender Check, Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw, 2010. at – Hommage à Malevich – 100 years of Black Square, Gradska Galeria, Ljubljana, 2015. among others.
TANJA OSTOJIĆ 