Gržinić and Šmid’s narration of (non)belonging to Europe: Performing practice

In video and new media art of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid, the abstract quality of a technologically generated and mediated world becomes an expressive and politically informed means of communication strategy across the region of the former East (of Europe). Working collaboratively for thirty years now, and using the medium of video in particular, the artists position memories of a Communist past and its symbolism with the contradictions of post-Socialist conditions, and in doing so engage in a critique of Western hegemony and global capitalism. Gržinić and Šmid's performative practice can be also envisaged as a sort of a leeway for enacting of identities and gender articulation. This ambivalent performance of identities is realised through deconstruction, appropriation and narrative critique. Gržinić and Šmid have been working with a critique of ideologies portrayed as the fluid, changing systems, revealing their rhetorical functions in cultural production. Ideology in their works is represented and manifested in the body, history, and culture. The paper will examine the examples of their most recent works, discussing opportunities for resisting tactics in contemporary art.