Tatjana Ilić – “Life in Paradox”
5 – 20 February 2026
On Thursday, 5 February, the exhibition “Life in Paradox” by Tatjana Ilić opens at the “Graphic Collective Gallery”. Her artistic practice is grounded in the medium of performance. Since the 1990s, her work has been defined by a bold authorial concept and a critical engagement with fundamental questions of existence.
The exhibition presents drawings and photographs, part of an artistic-documentary concept and an integral component of the visual and object-based materialisation of the artist’s performance, performed in an intimate space before an audience. During the performance, the artist placed a bunting (a bird) in her mouth and then covered her face with a mask from a mass-produced kit titled “PERSONAL KIT for the Protection of Citizens under Mask MC.1”.
The exhibition builds on conceptual foundations established in 2007 with the installation “I Carry a Bird Because of My Artistic Work”, presented at the Graphic Collective space on Obilićev venac. The bird, which became the subject of a dispute during a customs procedure, and freedom of movement—an inherent condition of free existence—through this action-based performance exposed the absurdities of bureaucratic barriers.
In a similar key, “Life in Paradox” addresses the symptoms and critical points of an administratively and capitalist-structured reality in which existence—oscillating between banal consumerism and intentionally generated pandemic fear—is often measured and defined through notions of items, quantity, condition, assortment (of both objects and living beings), inspection, protection, control, and safety… the possibility of free existence within spatially bounded conditions of life/breathing, protection in the face of ecological catastrophe through means that themselves become accumulated elements of ecocide. The bunting is stripped of cultural burden and symbolic-ideological implications within visual constructions of power and thus functions as a signifier of life and of art itself, writes Miroslav Sapundžić in the exhibition catalogue.
Tatjana Ilić (1966, Belgrade) graduated in 1995 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She continued her studies in the class of Jannis Kounellis at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, where she was awarded the title of Meisterschülerin in 1997. She received her PhD in 2012 with the thesis “The Performative Image in Photo-Thermovision Performance” at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Since 2003, she has been a member of the International Artists’ Guild (IKG). She has exhibited widely in Serbia and abroad (Germany, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Luxembourg, Austria), including the collateral programme of the 50th Venice Biennale. Her work has been featured in the “Analytical Survey of Global Performance Art”, published by the European Institute for Performance. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections. Since 1993, she has been a member of ULUS.
