[spectre] invitation:Tanja Vujinovic at the Museum of the City of Skopje

[Jan Kusej]

for immediate release

“Variola Vera”, video installation
Tanja Vujinovic

Open Graphic Studio
Museum of the City of Skopje
Mito Hadgi Vasilev bb
12.12.2001-10.01.2002
Opening: 12.12.2001. at 19h
Organization and public relations: Atanas Botev +389 (0)2 114 742, 
mgs@unet.com.mk
With the support of: Pro Helvetia, Youth Cultural Center Maribor, and Museum 
of the City of Skopje

The video installation "Variola Vera" is derived from Yugoslav film director 
G. Markovic's motion picture, which is a narrative about the last great 
outbreak of this disease in Europe (Belgrade, 1972), and takes place in the 
isolation ward of a hospital. The subject gains in its possible actuality in 
the context of the latest treats of potential bio-terrorist attacks. Video 
projections are functioning as diverse mirrors that are reflecting 
developments of individual anxieties within the collective. Variants of this 
work were exhibited this year in Cultural Center Gallery Belgrade and Media 
Nox Gallery Maribor. In January 2002, it will be presented within the Helium 
project, organized by Ballongmagasinet and NIFCA (Nordic Institute for 
Contemporary Art).

«…with Variola Vera, Vujinovic insists on the ontological dimension within 
the social. Variola Vera is the ontological horizon of the Balkan condition. 
The installation, in drawing upon the classic feature film entitled Variola 
Vera, produced some 20 years ago in the territory known as Yugoslavia, is 
the contingency reservoir. Our very certainty of the dissolution of any 
certainty is already stated - there, in the film. Hence, it indicates a 
deeper ontological level of contingency within the social. Variola Vera is 
an actualization of the absent ground for present representations of art. 
Variola Vera is the marker of our proper, deeply bodily dimension of 
uncertainty. Variola Vera is the dark, smelly, dirty, poisoned flesh of any 
society and someone’s, anyone’s, private obsessions ».
Marina Grzinic, philosopher and new media theorist, margrz@zrc-sazu.si
Part of the text from the exhibition catalogue

Tanja Vujinovic Kusej was born in 1973 in Yugoslavia. Since 1996, she has 
been presenting interventions, video installations and other works at 
various galleries, artist-run centres and public spaces in more than thirty 
individual and group exhibitions (Germany, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Scotland, 
France, Slovenia etc.). Tanja had completed her studies in Belgrade at the 
College of Industrial Design, at the Faculty of Fine Arts and had been a 
guest student in Jan Dibbets class at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
In her work, Tanja Vujinovic deals with some of the most significant aspects 
of contemporary society: various crises and its effects on the individual, 
manifestation of ideological parameters imposed by mass media; appropriating 
mass media visual and audio material and transforming it into new structures 
with modified meanings. In early videos and drawings-pictograms, she 
investigates a variety of compulsive activities interiorized by the 
individual as well as a number of restrictive behavioural patterns, within 
the frame of acceptable and expected. Repetitive annoying noise and visual 
element patterns are investigating mechanisms of subliminal suggestive media 
messages.
She is a freelance artist currently living in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Contact address:
tanjavujinovic@hotmail.com
www.ljudmila.org/vujinovic/



















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