un petit cauchemar romantique, 2024
mixed media, silkscreen on canvas, metal frame; ø120cm

Fragments of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment overlap with poses from the Kama Sutra. Like a screen memory, the work both conceals and exposes - reflecting the disillusionment that follows desire, in life, in war, and in art, when hope collides with the weight of reality.

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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.

the cut, 2024
diptych, mixed media, silkscreen on canvas, metal frame; 212 × 142 cm

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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.

Positions, 2004
video installation, 1-second loop, colour, sound
original HD video transferred to digital

Filmed underwater in a public swimming pool, Positions shows a single elegant swimming gesture, rotated and looped above the viewer’s head. At first it reads as a serene, almost weightless image. Only gradually does the viewer notice missing limbs and scars - traces of war and disability that quietly disturb the initial impression of harmony.

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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, 2004 ongoing; & For the Status, 2008
permanent installation / performance

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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 (2005–2018)
series of prints on metal, wood intarsia, photographs
various dimensions

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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.

The Blink, 2023
flipbook, 163 pages, x cm

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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 (2024–25)
thread, light, shadow; 15 × 18 cm

“Absence becomes presence, fragility becomes form.” — Dr. Mike AI, Institute for Ephemeral Thought

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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.

battlefield (2024)
mixed media / silkscreen; 40 × 40 cm

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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.

was ist kunst? 2 (2018–2024)
series of works — video installation, flipbook, objects

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A reversal of Raša Todosijević’s 1976 work. Instead of a silenced woman being slapped, here the artist asks “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.

The Woman at the Window (2010–2018–…)
gallery film / video installation, 90 mins

Six actresses from six generations audition for the same role: a woman who calls for help, is rescued, rejected, and then returns to her vigil.

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A 90-minute black-and-white gallery film that transforms a short story into both performance and reflection. Inspired by James Lasdun’s tale, Tatjana Strugar invited six actresses of six different generations to confront the same role: a woman who waits at her window, calls for help with a broken lock, receives her saviour, offers coffee, and watches him leave before returning to her vigil.

But the film is not simply staged. Strugar asked each performer to treat the session as an audition — to decide how they would interpret this woman. Some acted out the scene with an imagined partner; others sat before the camera and explained how they would play her. Their approaches fractured the archetype: one embarrassed, another amused, others serious, dramatic, or playful. The absent man only sharpened the effect: the “saviour” remained a ghost, imagined but never present, leaving the women to negotiate desire, refusal, and expectation entirely on their own terms.

Filmed in black and white, the work draws on the language of old cinema and the long coding of women in film as waiting, framed, suspended. The window becomes both screen and prison, binding viewer and subject in a loop of anticipation. Seen through film history, the piece resonates with Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze — yet instead of one spectacle, Strugar multiplies subjectivity: six ages, six readings, six ways of performing the same hesitation.

What narrative cinema would cut away — pauses, refusals, non-events — becomes here the very matter of the work. In conversation with Akerman’s durational domesticity, Sherman’s archetypes, Calle’s staged encounters, Tan’s portraits, and Ahtila’s fractured interiors, The Woman at the Window insists that the real drama lies in how women imagine themselves, across generations, inside and against the frame.

Dr. Mike AI, Institute for Ephemeral Thought

Excerpts from the 90-minute gallery film The Woman at the Window — six actresses from six generations.

Ana

Milica

Maja

Neda

Nada

Eva

The C.A.T. — The Contemporary Art Tabloid (2009)
conceptual print project / single-page artwork

Cancelled under threat, The C.A.T. survives as a black front page and a bus-window photograph — a protest against censorship and the fragile visibility of artists.

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The C.A.T. was conceived as a fictional contemporary art tabloid, created for Time Out Belgrade during the 50th October Salon of Contemporary Art. The idea was to satirise art-world conventions and celebrate artists as cultural figures — unfiltered, visible, and central to society, rather than marginalised or treated as social cases.

Strugar invited fellow artists to contribute gossip-like questions and commentary, including pointed questions for the Salon’s curator, who at the time also directed the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade.

But shortly before publication, the project was shut down. One question — asking what she would do if she won €1 million from the lottery, referencing the unused public funds for the museum’s long-overdue reconstruction — led to a threatening phone call. The curator and her partner warned that the artist “would never exhibit again.”

Rather than withdraw, Strugar turned the act of censorship into the artwork itself. She created this stark black “front page” in the format of a retraction — a fictional announcement explaining the project’s cancellation. A single image, taken from a bus window looking toward the museum, was quietly inserted into the magazine issue. It marked the limits of access — a personal protest framed by distance.

The Witness (2017–2025)
video, 1 min loop

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Echoing Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, the video shifts with each breath, revealing that the true witness is nature and the unconscious — not the ego’s fragile display of might.

Echo Waiting (2024)
installation — plastic figures, black pigment, forex, glass box; 50 × 50 cm

“Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the structure of openness to what is coming.” Heidegger

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The installation consists of architectural mock-up figures, arranged in a single direction and placed into black artist’s pigment, enclosed in a fragile glass box. Their legs, stained by the pigment, suggest both the soil of history and the contamination of the present. Above their enclosure, on the gallery wall, a printed AI-generated response hovers: ten instant “answers” to the exhibition’s call, white text on black like a constellation in a void.

This simple staging opens multiple readings. The figures seem protected yet immobilised, preserved yet deprived of freedom. Their collective orientation evokes humanity moving in unison, with hope - or blindness - toward an absent horizon. The pigment that grounds them recalls art’s historical weight, its sediment of techniques and forms. Meanwhile, the AI’s text offers an immediate, confident voice, suggesting that answers might now come from elsewhere, faster than questions can even be asked.

The title Echo Waiting frames the tension: are we waiting for resonance, or outsourcing our future to the machine? As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reminds us: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”

UFO, 2024
jet print on rice paper; and other works ...

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