The Mark of Blue 2025
Autor: Tanja Ostojić
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 18 × 28 cm
Pages: 40 pages
Language: English
Edition: Limited edition of 50 copies + 10 AP
“Vacation with Curator” (2003) is a conceptual art work by Tanja Ostojić consisting of an extended performance, a series of photographs, photo collages and a website, produced in collaboration with Edi Muka, curator of the 2nd Tirana Biennale. The artwork that stages a fake romantic getaway at Albanian Riviera, is part of Ostojić’s “Strategies of Success/Curator Series” (2001–03) — a conceptual art project and an embodied research, focused on the power-and-gender relations within the art system, analysing 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. The first phase of the “Vacation with Curator” included the production of a series of photographs with the Biennale’s curator Edi Muka and the artist Tanja Ostojić captured together in the manner of paparazzi photos, in intimate situations at various locations along Albanian coast. Photo collages and a paparazzi web page followed. However, an important part of the project — that included distribution of the images to Albanian press allowing them to interpret them in their own way, and the resultant press clippings to become an integral part of the work — was banned by the organisers.
Tanja Ostojić is Berlin-based performance and interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator, internationally renowned as a pioneer of institutional gendered critique and for her work in socially and politically engaged and public art.