The Naked Life video-performance is based on Written Comments of the European Roma Rights Centre Concerning Germany For Consideration by the United Nations Human Rights Committee at its 80th Session, 2004. I read the fates of different Roma families taken from the report’s segment on deportations. Each testimony is more disturbing than the previous one. While reading, I strip my own clothing from my body, remaining naked in the end and symbolically vulnerable as bare life.
Artist Tanja Ostojić’s ongoing interdisciplinary project Naked Life (2004–2011) investigates issues of discrimination of Roma and Sinti, the largest minorities in Europe. The project deals with bare life, social and political exclusion, deportation, racism, state racism, biopolitics, xenophobia, and diverse cultural identities.
Tanja Ostojic
Tanja Ostojić (born 1972) is a Berlin based performance, interdisciplinary artist and cultural activist who studied art in Belgrade and Nantes. Ostojić includes herself as a character in her performances, making use of explicit political positioning, humour, and her own social and political body to communicate the issues. She works in a variety of media as well as through artistic research, examining social configurations and relations of power, often with reference to the concept of “biopolitics” and “bare life.” Current exhibitions include: Gateways. Art and Networked Culture, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn and +Decolonial Aesthetics, Fredric Jameson Gallery, Duke University, Durham USA, 2011. She recently published Integration Impossible? The politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, argobooks Berlin, 2009.
www.van.at/see/tanja