Was ist Kunst II
Flip book, gallery view after the intervention
Video still, from the 12-minute performance (2018)
Was ist Kunst IV, 2024 — spinning installation, crochet and metal
A reversal of Raša Todosijević’s 1976 work. Instead of a silenced woman being slapped,
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? Is the true vulgarity in the body — or in the structures that deny it?
Forty years after Todosijević’s canonical video, Tatjana Strugar responds with a
reversal. In the original work, Todosijević repeatedly slapped his wife while posing
the question “What is art?” She was forbidden to speak. The piece reflected censorship,
the art market, and the absence of critique in Yugoslavia — and today would likely be
banned for violence against women.
In Was ist Kunst? II (2018), Strugar flips the roles. For twelve uninterrupted
minutes, she asks the same question while slapping a male reproductive organ framed
like a portrait. The body responds spontaneously and visibly. The work confronts
taboos: who performs violence in art, whose silence still structures the scene, and
where critique has gone quiet.
The project premiered in the solo exhibition About the Vulgar (2018). 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. Fragmented across
walls and corridors, the piece became a metaphor for the fractured bond between
artist, institution, and public.
The work has since mutated across media. In 2021 it became a flipbook, dissecting a
single gesture into repetition and earning a prize for conceptual rigour. By 2024, it
expanded into spinning metal sculptures with crocheted phalluses — fragile, humorous,
and unsettling. Through these shifts, Was ist Kunst? II insists that provocation
is not static: it migrates, multiplies, and confronts new taboos.
Exhibitions
2024 – Un petit cauchemar romantique, solo show, Sales Gallery, Belgrade
2021 – Triennale of Drawing, C. Zuzorić Art Pavilion, Belgrade (Prize for Drawing)
2018 – About the Vulgar / Erratum, solo show, Remont Gallery, Belgrade