Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić

Edited by Tanja Ostojić

Published by Live Art Development Agency and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, 2018

240 x 194mm, 160 pages, 68 colour images, 21 b&w images

Trade Orders: Central Books, see our Distribution page for more information

Launch event at LADA on 6 March 2018.

This publication is based upon the Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić (2011-17), an interdisciplinary participatory research art project by Tanja Ostojić that included academic and artistic research, five creative workshops, a number of public events, one group performance, and two exhibitions involving more then 30 women.

“Tanja Ostojić is an extraordinary and influential Berlin-based, Serbian artist who, since 1994, has created research-led, performative projects that engage with issues of gender politics and feminism, of migration and displacement, and of labour. Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić brings these strands of her practice together in a multi-disciplinary, process-based, transnational project from a network of women around the world all named Tanja Ostojić.”

Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency, London 

“Most importantly, although transindividuality was always inscribed, its potentiality became visible and comprehensible only through the ‘transformative encounters’, the mutual introductions, and social exchanges during the one-on-one conversations, co-production processes, and public events of the Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić project. Thus a new sentiment of solidarity with the same (the name), but different (subjectivity and personality) has emerged. It can be read between the lines of this hypertext, the Lexicon with only one entry: Tanja Ostojić, but with so many homonyms and a number of complex cross-references and interpretations that together create an ethnographic and psycho-geographic hypertext available for further research.”

Dr Suzana Milevska, art theorist and curator, Skopje

Review from Seecult after the launch event in Belgrade.

“While Lexicon seems to be a part and parcel of what is termed socially- engaged art practices, its extended chronological commitment, and commitment to actual, as opposed to forced or artificially enacted social relations we often find in socially-engaged artwork, it is very much outside of the popular contemporary artistic forms. Women’s commitments to each other, friendships and support that took place (and are ongoing) in the Lexicon contravene oppressive and exploitative forms of labour encountered on the margins of the Western world.”

Review in Journal Sociologija by Dr Bojana Videkanic (2018)

Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić was launched at an event at LADA on 6 March 2018 with contributions from the writer and curator Adrian Heathfield, the curator and writer Alessandra Cianetti of performingborders, and Teresa Albor from the art collective GRACE. Listen to the audio from the launch here: