Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojic and Feminism in Transition
The text examines artist Tanja Ostojic’s interdisciplinary research project entitled Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, in the light of feminist materialist theories, participatory art, and socio-political analysis of the former Yugoslav region. Tanja Ostojić decided to frame her project around the lives of women who share her first and last name. Ostojić’s name-sisters became her collaborators as the work turned into a large-scale, long-term project involving 33 women and their personal histories. The women all share a mutual connection to the Yugoslav region that has directly or indirectly shaped their lives through its turbulent recent history. Artist’s intent was to use the stories encountered by collaborating with her name-sisters as a foil to uncover and highlight the connecting personal narratives following Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s and in doing so point to the detrimental legacies of war and transition on women’s lives.
In this article, author’s main argument borrows from Karen Barad’s discursive-material ontology to point out that Lexicon activates a form of material feminism which functions intra-actively, in other words, in both its form and content the work recognizes that women’s lives are continuously constituted and re-constituted through multiple linguistic and material formations, or through complex relationships between humans, non-humans, and various discursive and material contexts. In using materialist feminist analysis, the author argues that Lexicon gives primacy to women’s agency and proposes a sustained, growing forms of resistance to the forms of post-socialist exploitation.