In my recent practice, I revisit a recurring motif: the sky viewed through branched treetops - a vision sparked by the euphoric enchantment of falling in love during the spring of 2005.
As that initial romance faded, these sketches morphed into nightmarish abstractions, mirroring the tangled interplay between the idealism of art and the messy realities of everyday politics. Through persistent reworking, I fought to preserve the vividness, color, and innocence of that fleeting moment, much like one clings to hope amid societal power struggles, systemic misogyny, or political upheaval.
While attending psychoanalysis, I recognized this imagery in my work as Freud’s “screen memories”-benign shields guarding me from personal and collective traumas, from my childhood in a dissolving Yugoslavia to the breakdown of my marriage and experiences of motherhood and sexual abuse.
Just as art negotiates its place within institutional and societal constraints, my branched treetops reflect both an escape from and a confrontation with the grief, control, and nightmares woven into daily political life.

      Inspired by Lacan’s coupure, the diptych shows an abstract sky through branches, split by a finger-width cut —      a fleeting insight amidst everyday chaos. The cut itself portrays life’s unpredictability: no symmetry, no rules.   

 

The work was inspired by the artist’s experience swimming alongside a group of disabled people – many of them war survivors – who were later denied access to a gallery by a guard’s discriminatory remark. By rotating the underwater footage and projecting it high above eye level, the installation turned the gallery into an abstract pool where bodies became lines, rhythms, and positions in space.

The viewer looks up, admiring the beauty of the gesture, before recognising the absence of limbs. This delay between perception and recognition is crucial: it exposes how easily institutions aestheticise bodies while keeping certain people outside their doors.

Positions is part of a larger cycle that includes the ramp-installation The Loop / For the Status, which later provided physical access  to the gallery space and symbolically re-opened it to those who had been excluded.    

The Loop, the first wheelchair ramp in a Belgrade gallery, bridged exclusion and inclusion in art. Left in place for four years, it silently took part in every group show. Later reused in the performance For the Status, it allowed the artist to meet official freelance renewal rules with one ironic gesture. The work reveals how institutions force artists through loops of bureaucratic legitimacy.    

La petite mort is not a euphemism but a rupture. Here, Lacan’s objet petit a—the impossible object of desire—becomes visible in a skirt left on the floor. Both erotic residue and social imprint, it sits between intimacy and class, ornament and labor, presence and disappearance.    

163 photographs extracted from Chris Marker’s La Jetée. By dissecting the film’s single moving image frame by frame, The Blink honors Marker’s experiment with time and memory. Reflecting on her own encounters with the film, the artist emphasises the vulnerability and impermanence of moments.      

Floating was embroidered on dissolvable fabric from a photograph of a woman’s body drifting in a pool. When the fabric dissolved, only suspended threads remained. The resulting abstraction cast its shadow as a drawing on the wall.
Too fragile to endure, the first Floating vanished soon after its premiere. Its second version—already a double—became a ghost haunted by the loss of the first.
Like Positions, La Petite Mort, and The Blink, this work exists through what remains: a gesture, a trace, an after-image. But Floating also exposes art’s fixation on doubles - on society’s insistence on resemblance, on recognising one work inside another.
The second Floating is not a substitute but a conceptual shift: a doppelgänger pointing back to the original while becoming its own piece. In this doubling, fragility speaks not only of objects, but of the middle-aged artist herself - suspended, vanishing, holding by a thread of time, repeating gestures that can never return unchanged.    

      A reworking of Serbia’s national myth — the Kosovo Maiden, a woman offering water to a fallen hero —        a story that haunted the artist since childhood, imprinting generations of women with the ideal of servitude:        men as heroes, women as healers.

      In Battlefield, that myth collides with erotic archetypes.        Missionary (service), doggy (devotion) — the poses repeat into patterns of power and vulnerability,        echoing how society scripts the female role in war, love, and daily life.    

A reversal of Raša Todosijević’s 1976 work - instead of a silenced woman being slapped, here the artist asks the same question : “Was ist Kunst?” while her hand strikes a male intimate body part. Roles flip and taboos shift: what kind of violence is tolerated in art? Can a spontaneous erection respond where critique has gone silent? Is the true vulgarity in the body - or in the structures that deny it?

Forty years after Raša Todosijević’s renowned video work, Tatjana Strugar responds with a reversal. In the original 1976 piece, Todosijević slapped his wife repeatedly while demanding she answer the question “What is art?” She was forbidden to speak. The work reflected censorship, the art market, and the absence of critique in Yugoslavia. Today, it would likely be banned for violence against women.

In Was ist Kunst? 2 (2018), Strugar flips the roles. For twelve uninterrupted minutes, she asks the same question - “Was ist Kunst?” - while slapping a male reproductive organ framed like a portrait. The body responds, spontaneously and visibly. The work confronts taboos: What kind of violence is acceptable in art? Who performs it? Whose silence still structures the scene?

The video premiered in Strugar’s solo exhibition O vulgarnom (About the Vulgar), which dealt with emotion, fear, desire, and the position of women. Met with institutional silence, the exhibition ended with an “Erratum”: the artist dismantled the works, stacked them in a corner, and left the videos running. Projected across walls and corridors, the piece became fragmented by the gallery architecture - a metaphor for the fractured bond between artist, institution, and public.

The series has since grown. In 2021, Was ist Kunst? 2 became a flipbook, dissecting a single gesture into repetition and earning a prize for its conceptual rigour. By 2024, it expanded into metal sculptures with crocheted phalluses - fragile, humorous, and unsettling. When viewers slap the circular base, the objects spin - absurd echoes of the original gesture.

Through these mutations - video, book, object - Was ist Kunst? 2 insists that provocation is not static- it migrates, multiplies, and confronts new taboos.