TANJA OSTOJIĆ

Vacation with Curator is a conceptual art work comprising of extended performance, a series of paparazzi photographs, photo collages and a website, produced in collaboration with Edi Muka, curator of the 2^nd Tirana Biennale, Albania. The work is a part of Strategies of Success /Curator Series Art Project.

^{Tanja Ostojic: Vacation with Curator project, paparazzi photographers: Rudina Memaga, Arian Risvani, Heldi Pema, 2003}

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. The last one was produced for but ultimately censored in large portion by the Tirana Biennale in Albania.

The first phase of the Vacation with Curator project in May 2003 included the successful production of a series of quasi-paparazzi photographs with the Biennale’s curator Edi Muka and me captured at various locations on the Albanian coast. I produced two photo collages from this and they were supposed to have been shown at the Biennale exhibition when it opened a few months later. In the framework of my project, the organisers also produced a small quasi-paparazzi web page with some of those images, which was linked to the official Biennale website. The webpage was not visible either in the exhibition or on the Biennale homepage. The important part of this project was, however, banned, as I was told, because it could have directly ruined the re-election campaign of Edi Rama who was, at the time, city Mayor of Tirana and the director of the Tirana Biennale (Mayor of Tirana 2000–2011, then Prime Minister of Albania 2013–present). There were already some rumours present in Albanian press at the time that accused Rama, who had served earlier as Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, of laundering money through art. As the success of the Tirana Biennale was supposed to work in support of his re-election campaign, I was told all of a sudden that it was not suitable or acceptable to have topless and beach photos of Edi Muka and myself in the Albanian press at the time. An integral part of my initial artistic concept was to provide Albanian press with photos of this work and to see what happens. The resultant press clippings would then become an integral part of the work. However, as a result of the ban, not one of the photos was ever allowed to be part of the press images of the Biennale or given to the press. Additionally, as a participating artist I was unfortunately not invited to attend the Biennale opening, while many others were there.

(Tanja Ostojić: “On the Development of Interdisciplinary Feminist Methodologies and Perspectives Within my Artistic Practice: I’ll Be Your Angel (2001) and Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić (2011–17)” in Feminist Art Activism and Artivisms, ed. Katy Deepwell, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2020.)