Call for participants: Tanja Ostojić‘s Misplaced Women? workshop

A free two day workshop on ideas of displacement led by Tanja Ostojić

Dates: Tuesday 13 and Wednesday 14 December 2016

Times: 11 to 4pm both days plus public performance and discussion from 7pm on Wednesday

The Misplaced Women? workshop and performance with Tanja Ostojić is taking place within the context of a LADA residency by Elena Marchevska exploring Live Art practices and methodologies in relation to the experiences of the displaced.

The workshop involves the unpacking of a suitcase or handbag in a public sphere which signifies a displacement, and aims to familiarise the participants with the topic and to stimulate interventions in public spaces, making space for discussion, performance, and creative interventions in public space, and is designed to interrogate the reality of displacement through topics such as travelling, identity, illegality, security, and the private/public.

Notes from the workshop will be gathered in the form of texts, drawings, photographs, videos and small interventions. We will also document the public interventions.

Outcomes will be presented to the public at the end of the second day and included on the Misplaced Women? project website.

Deadline for applications: Friday 4 November.

Context

The workshop with Tanja Ostojić is being organsied by the artist and researcher Elena Marchevska for her residency as part of LADA’s Restock, Rethink, Reflect Four (RRR4) project on Live Art and Privilege.

RRR4 aims to mark and map the ways in which Live Art has developed new forms of access to, and understandings of, knowledge, agency, and inclusion in relation to the under-represented, marginalised and disenfranchised constituencies of the young, the old, the displaced, and those experiencing the lived realities of class and cultural privilege.

Elena’s residency is exploring Live Art practices and methodologies in relation to the experiences of the displaced. As part of her residency, Elena has invited Tanja Ostojić to run a Misplaced Women? workshop and present a Misplaced Women? performance.

Misplaced Women?

“The Misplaced Women? project, ongoing since 2009, consists of performances and workshops, including contributions by international artists, writers, students and those who have experienced displacement first-hand. Within this project we embody and enact some everyday life activities that signify displacement as common to transients, migrants, war and disaster refugees, as it is to the itinerant artists travelling the world to earn their living. Those performances are continuing themes of migration, desired mobility, and relations of power and vulnerability in regards to the mobile and female body. Participants are invited to perform Misplaced Women? and to share their experiences online and during public discussions. Suggested locations for performances include train stations, airports, borders, underground, police stations, refugee camps, specific parks, prisons, etc.” Tanja Ostojić

Contributions are posted in the form of images, notes, stories or videos to the Misplaced Women? project’s website.

Workshop participants

Participants of all backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome, but we particularly encourage artists working in Live Art/performance art and those who are interested in issues of migration, power, representations of gender and art in the public realm.

Participants must commit to both days.

The workshop is free and tea/coffee and lunch will be provided.

We are able to contribute up to £100 to travel costs for participants who are based outside London.

Applications

The deadline for applications is Friday 4 November.

Applicants will be notified by 18 November at the latest.

To apply please complete this form

Biographies

Dr Elena Marchevska is a performance artist and researcher. She studied directing, performance, new media and feminism, and is currently teaching Performance Studies at London South Bank University. Her artistic work explores borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. She is interested in creating and researching work that provides means by which people can meet, human to human, in all their differences, in the most sensitive and sincere way possible. Much of her work is created through collaboration and sharing of stories and lived experiences. She has been involved in many international collaborations over the last ten years that explore issues of exile, war and post-conflict resolutions, including collaborations with CIE Kumulus and Nomad Dance Institute.

Tanja Ostojić is a renowned Berlin based performance and interdisciplinary artist of Serbian origin whose artworks engage with feminism and migration politics. She includes herself as a character in performances and uses diverse media in her artistic researches, thereby examining social configurations and relations of power. She works predominantly from the migrant woman’s perspective, while political positioning and integration of the recipient define approaches in her work. Since 1994 she presented her work in numerous exhibitions, festivals and venues around the world. She has given talks, lectures, seminars and workshops at academic conferences and at art universities around Europe and in the Americas.

Credits

Elena Marchevska’s residency is a collaboration with Counterpoints Arts and builds on LADA’s 2015 partnership on the dis/placed programme of events which was organised in response to global demographic shifts and unprecedented levels of human displacement.

Restock, Rethink, Reflect Four is a collaboration with Dr Amit Rai of Queen Mary, University of London, and is also part of LADA’s work for the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP), an EU-funded research project looking at collaborative practices within socially engaged contexts.

Full image credit: Marija Jevtić, Tanja Ostojić, Sunčica Šido and Nela Antonović performing Misplaced Women? inside the Info Park, Central Bus station Belgrade, Serbia, as one of the group performances in public spaces in Belgrade, conducted on October 29, 2015, during Misplaced Woman? workshop with Tanja Ostojić, thematising solidarity with the refuges on the Balkan route. Organised as a part of the From Diaspora to Diversity, Remont, Belgrade, Serbia. Photo: Lidija Antonović.