situation that turns fiction
into an instrument of communication
significance of remoteness
separation
discordance
ambivalent feeling of communicational barrier
(perhaps, the wall between us was only a window)

Dobrila De Negri

During the nineties, art has been reflecting a global phenomenon: the disappearing of sexual, cultural, national and economic borders. In this decade, people and artists coming from crisis countries like Yugoslavia (as well as many others) have faced frontiers and barriers, not only of a political nature but also in culture and communication. The establishment of new borders in the Balkans countries has become a synonym of violence and massacres, as well as a deep wound in our own cultural and national identity. At the very moment of physically crossing a border and starting a `nomadic` life, a difficulty - and sometimes impossibility - for people and artists of the new generation raised in the middle of mass culture to integrate themselves in that same system whose cultural codes they have absorbed has become evident.

An insuperable barrier has appeared: it is the virtual image of own cultural identity constructed and projected by mainstream media, in which we cannot possibly mirror ourselves or with which we cannot possibly identify. IN that mixture of objective and subjective obstacles, only one question can be posed: the question of existence.

Tanja Ristovski's installation Idiosyncrasy (according to Webster's dictionary: 'a peculiarity of constitution or temperament' or ' individual hypersensitiveness') reconstructs, on a small scale, the chaotic gap between the individual experience and the media re-presentation of reality on a planetary scale. It also expresses the awareness of the extent to which impersonal, political, cultural and media produced 'truths' determine social life and human relations.

Through different expressive means - posters with text and images referring to her own memory and identity, interwoven with visual documents of violence published in newspapers; computer and CD ROM with video animation on the same subject; Living Room Accessories, seven chairs printed with images of war victims and the military forces involved in the conflict - the artist creates a network of simultaneous situations, suspended between reality and fiction, between the past and the obsession of present events. This works expresses the artist's intention of taking an active and responsible attitude toward reality, no matter how oppressive it might be, and a need for putting own identity and integrity within the context of the complex and turbulent transformation of the world as we know it, in the transition from this millennium to the next.

"Idiosynchrasy" Instalation, Print, Multimedia, 1999
dAPERTutto, 48th Biennale di Venezia, I