Iztranzicionisana or Transitioned Out, online performance performed at Work and Working Through Symposium, organized by Robert Luzar and Material/Performing Research Centre at Bath Spa University, UK June 2021, and as part of Tanja Ostojić’s project and exhibition Mis(s)placed Women, Belgrade Serbia October 2021.
Photo credits: Johanna Householder.
Iztranzicionisana or Transitioned Out is a long-term multidisciplinary artistic project encompassing performance, poetry, drawing, video and installation work. The series deals first with the history of the breakup of Yugoslavia and its ensuing social chaos (mass murder, refugee crisis, destruction of urban and industrial and rural areas, destruction of social bonds, etc.), connecting it to the post-Yugoslav economic and social ‘transition’ from socialism to forms of wild capitalism which were initiated in the 1990s after the breakup of the country. My own story of becoming a refugee and ending up in Canada is woven into the background of the project. Ultimately, the work connects these 30-year-old historical processes of dispossession and destruction in the Balkans to more recent events of the so-called refugee crisis which saw thousands of migrants fleeing their countries in Asia , Africa, and the Middle East trying to traverse ex-Yugoslav region (the Balkan Route) to come to the Western Europe.
The ex-Yugoslav countries, themselves ripped apart by capitalist exploitation and neocolonial politics, are forced by Western Europe to stop the crossing of migrants. Serbia, Macedonia and especially Bosnia have been turned into no-go zones where migrants are kept from going forward into Western Europe, and local population itself trying to escape to EU, is made to keep them there. The wretchedness of the situation is telling of the thirty-year long process of transition and its devastating results.
The work interrogates implications, histories, and impacts of transition in the region, and in particular the marks it leaves on the female body––forms of extreme exploitation under capitalism, reversal of women’s rights, return of nationalism and patriarchy, rise in extreme right-wing politics, rise of fascism, and finally migrant crisis. All these socio-economic and political transformations have occurred in the last 25-30 years and have eroded women’s lives creating sacrificial zones in which all who are trapped suffer. As someone who was born in Bosnia and became a refugee in 1992 I have been observing the processes described above, trying to understand how various waves of crises from the 1990s onward have shaped political, economic and social lives of women.
While my work is poetic, it is also very political and is equally critical of the economic and political issues around the Balkans, as it is engaged in a critique of art as an institution that is unable to address the root causes of the issues it raises. As my work is mainly rooted in performance art it seeks to eschew the typical entrapments of artistic practice which is usually presented in a gallery to a selected audience. For this reason I often present my work in the public (street, outdoor spaces, commons) and directly engage with the political.