I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night until I was 29 years old. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in 'The Firestar'βeverything was done before 10 in the evening.
She was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from to Making use of ten knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game , in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one's hand, the title of the piece getting its name from the number of knives used.
Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of ten she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself ten times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body β the pain and the sounds of the stabbing; the double sounds from the history and the replication.
When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the communist five-pointed star or pentagram represented a physical and mental purification, while also addressing the political traditions of her past. At first, due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience did not realize that the artist had lost consciousness from lack of oxygen inside the star.
However, when the flames came very near to her body and she still remained inert, a doctor and others intervened and extricated her from the star. When you lose consciousness you can't be present, you can't perform. She performed the work at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, in In Part I, which had a duration of 50 minutes, she ingested a medication she describes as 'given to patients who suffer from catatonia , to force them to change the positions of their bodies.
