INNSBRUCK (SEEcult.org) - The exhibition “Integration Impossible?: the politics of migration in the work of Tanja Ostojic 2000–2007” is on view from September 18 through November 8 at the Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck. It is first one woman show of well known Berlin based Serbian artist Tanja Ostojic, who delineates the field of her artistic approach through research, reflection, communication, exchange, and criticism of contemporary society.

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In recent years, she has consistently created an oeuvre including performance, video, photography, and a considerable amount of archive material, which pinpoints and criticizes social realities.

In her solo show in the Kunstpavillon, Tanja Ostojic presents works from three of her important projects: Crossing Borders Series, Integration Project, and Naked Life.

"Crossing Borders series" consists of various strategies for crossing borders, which migrants have been using for decades. Part of the project is as well the practice of checking the intermarriages between  the EU and non EU citizens.

From this cycle of works, departs as well one of the most famous Ostojic's wok  L'origine du monde / After Courbet. It is a photograph that  was shown as well as a billboard in public space in Vienna at the end of 2005. In the picture, the artist's lower abdomen is shown clad in EU underpants, re-enacting the 1866 work The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet. One of Austria's most-read tabloid newspapers launched the media scandal. Obviously, opinion makers at the time wanted at all costs to prevent a discussion over how Europe, allows migrants  to enter into the fortress of European Union.

The "Integration Project" deals with debates behind the term integration: language schools, discussions about determining levels of migration, the rights of asylum seekers in various EU countries, the instrumentalisation of the term integration and terrorism ...

The Integration Project Archive, part of the exhibition, comprises many hours of unedited video interviews, audio recordings, books, an essay, interviews, photos, brochures, and pamphlets and has an important relationship to the continuing research.

As part of the Integration Project Office, the archive is openly accessible. Those interested will have a free opportunity to take away photocopies of documents with them.

The video installation "Naked Life" deals with the topic of the Roma and Sinti, who are the largest minority group's in Europe.

This work takes as its theme the "bare life" deportation, naked survival, social and political exclusion, racism, state racism, xenophobia, and how we deal with different cultural identities. Tanja Ostojic stands in an empty room and reads reports on the fate of various Roma families. While reading the terrible facts on deportation and xenophobia, the artist begins to undress. In this way, she reveals the fragility of human life in an equally subtle and shocking way.

Tanja Ostojic, born in former Yugoslavia in 1972, studied art in Belgrade and Nantes. She is an independent interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin.

Ostojic includes herself as a character in situationist performances and uses diverse media in her artistic research, thereby examining social configurations and relations of power. She predominantly works from the migrant woman's perspective and the approach in her works is defined by political positioning, humor, and integration of the recipient. She is one of the most remarkable and successful Serbian artists of a new generation.

She has recently performed and exhibited in Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC; Shrinking Cities, Interventions, GfZK, Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig; Normalisation, Rooseum Malmö; Post Communist Conditions, KW, Berlin; In Transit, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Plateau of Humankind, 49th Venice Biennale; Manifesta 2, Luxembourg; ICA London...

Guiding tour and the book-in-progress presentation will be on November 7 at 5 pm.