invitation:Tanja Vujinovic at the Museum of the City of Skopje
jan
andraz.kusej at guest.arnes.si
Sun Dec 9 22:32:51 CET 2001
Variola Vera, video installation
Tanja Vujinovic
Open Graphic Studio
Museum of the City of Skopje
Mito Hadgi Vasilev bb
12.12.2001-10.01.2002
Opening: 12.12.2001. at 19h
Organization and public relations: Atanas Botev +389 (0)2 114 742,
mgs at unet.com.mk With the support of: Pro Helvetia, Youth Cultural
Center Maribor, and Museum of the City of Skopje
The video installation Variola Vera is derived from Yugoslav film
director G. Markovic's motion picture, which is a narrative about the
last great outbreak of this disease in Europe (Belgrade, 1972), and
takes place in the isolation ward of a hospital. The subject gains in
its possible actuality in the context of the latest treats of
potential bio-terrorist attacks. Video projections are functioning as
diverse mirrors that are reflecting developments of individual
anxieties within the collective. Variants of this work were exhibited
this year in Cultural Center Gallery Belgrade and Media Nox Gallery
Maribor. In January 2002, it will be presented within the Helium
project, organized by Ballongmagasinet and NIFCA (Nordic Institute
for Contemporary Art).
«with Variola Vera, Vujinovic insists on the ontological dimension
within the social. Variola Vera is the ontological horizon of the
Balkan condition. The installation, in drawing upon the classic
feature film entitled Variola Vera, produced some 20 years ago in the
territory known as Yugoslavia, is the contingency reservoir. Our very
certainty of the dissolution of any certainty is already stated -
there, in the film. Hence, it indicates a deeper ontological level of
contingency within the social. Variola Vera is an actualization of the
absent ground for present representations of art. Variola Vera is the
marker of our proper, deeply bodily dimension of uncertainty. Variola
Vera is the dark, smelly, dirty, poisoned flesh of any society and
someone's, anyone's, private obsessions ».
Marina Grzinic,philosopher and new media theorist, margrz at zrc-sazu.si
Part of the text from the exhibition catalogue
Tanja Vujinovic Kusej was born in 1973 in Yugoslavia. Since 1996, she
has been presenting interventions, video installations and other
works at various galleries, artist-run centres and public spaces in
more than thirty individual and group exhibitions (Germany,
Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Scotland, France, Slovenia etc.). Tanja had
completed her studies in Belgrade at the College of Industrial
Design, at the Faculty of Fine Arts and had been a guest student in
Jan Dibbets class at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. In her work,
Tanja Vujinovic deals with some of the most significant aspects of
contemporary society: various crises and its effects on the
individual, manifestation of ideological parameters imposed by mass
media; appropriating mass media visual and audio material and
transforming it into new structures with modified meanings. In early
videos and drawings-pictograms, she investigates a variety of
compulsive activities interiorized by the individual as well as a
number of restrictive behavioural patterns, within the frame of
acceptable and expected. Repetitive annoying noise and visual element
patterns are investigating mechanisms of subliminal suggestive media
messages. She is a freelance artist currently living in Ljubljana,
Slovenia.
Contact address:
tanjavujinovic at hotmail.com
www.ljudmila.org/vujinovic/
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