In her live performance Nausea, Sandra Sterle deliberately vomits to the tune of a song by Mišo Kovač "Dalmatinac nosi lančić oko vrata" ("A Dalmatian Man Wears a Chain Around His Neck"). The canonical song by Mišo Kovač, a cult personality of Croatia folk music, symbolizes the unbowed heritage of the patriarchal culture of the Dalmatia contained in a formula of sanctity and the unbroken tie of "blood and soil". By publicly inducing vomiting and displaying her own position of being powerless in the face of the normss of social majority, the artist constitutes herself as a subject in rebellion. Instead of verbal expression, she uses simple and primitive symbols as means of communication towards those she addresses. The work has polarized the public and stirred up a massive media response.
NauseaSandra Sterle (HR)
performance, DOPUST – Days of Open Performance, Split (HR), 2008
reenactment with Vesna Sorić, Student Center, Zagreb (HR), 2009
Sandra Sterle (HR)
Sandra Sterle (Zadar, 1965) graduated at the Department of Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and continued her education at the Department of Film and Video of the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. From 1991 to 2000 she lived and worked in Amsterdam, where she received several scholarships and awards for her artistic work. In 2001 she started teaching at the Arts Academy in Split, first a course on new media and then the courses entitled Performance and Video and Art in Context. Her works have been exhibited, performed and screened at numerous national and international artistic institutions. Her works move within both real and virtual geographies in relation to which she creates fluid identity configurations, constantly defining new social, biological and communicational formats. She is interested in physical performances as a medium of performing identity within the framework of a classical definition of a performance or through constructs, using video, film, media technologies or building methodologically complex narratives.
