[Reader-list] invitation:Tanja Vujinovic at the Museum of the City of Skopje

[jan]

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/