THE ARRANGEMENT
The Arrangement is an ongoing long-term performance project initiated by Marina Marković in 2020, probing the dynamics of power, autonomy, and institutional authority through the female body as a site of negotiation. Directly adapting the BDSM practice of the consensual agreement - a formal document outlining boundaries, consent, and power exchange - the project transforms these protocols into negotiated “arrangements” with institutions. Skin becomes a semi-permeable boundary for projection, inscription, and resistance, where social norms penetrate, shape, and are reconfigured by corporeal experience.
The project unfolds across interconnected chapters, each layering new inscriptions through these consent-based contracts: Over 120 arrangements with galleries, museums, and institutions resulted in their logos permanently tattooed onto Marković’s skin, making visible the circulation of power between personal agency and external structures. This culminated in a 2024 solo exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, where five theorists - Jesha Denegri, Daniele Capra, Lucrezia Nardi, Matthieu Lelièvre, and ORLAN - contributed to a meta-text inscribed during a five-hour live performance by three tattooists. The “theoretical grid” overlaid prior logos, turning the body into a living archive.
At Paris’s Centre Wallonie Bruxelles during the Performissima Festival, eight curators - Jean-Max Colard, Vittoria Matarrese, Jean-Christophe Arcos, Matthieu Lelièvre, Stéphanie Pécourt, Antoine Pickels, Olivia Voisin, and Lucrezia Nardi - added curatorial texts and signatures via arrangement, creating a “living contract” etched into flesh.
Photo by: Ivona Živulj
For the 60th October Salon in Belgrade, a site-specific installation featured the event logo tattooed under an arrangement, with EKG, EMC, and sensors recording physiological responses - exploring skin as ambiguous territory where internal and external realities intersect.
Through these phases, The Arrangement positions the body as a palimpsest of biographical, theoretical, institutional, and physiological traces, revealing vulnerability as a strategy of resistance while challenging boundaries between self and Other, agency and submission.
MARINA MARKOVIĆ
Marina Marković (Yugoslavia, 1983) centres her practice on the body, moving from personal experience into broader social questions around gender, sexuality, and power. Shaped by her early experience with anorexia, her work examines the politics of the body and the tension between free will and coercion.
Photo by: Ljubo Ašćerić
Since 2006, she has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations across Belgrade, New York, Vienna, Paris, and Bern. Her long-term project The Arrangement culminated in a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2024). Her work has been included in institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon and Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris, and she has participated in residencies including ISCP New York and Q21 Vienna.
A recipient of the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award and the Vladimir Veličković Drawing Award, Marković’s work is held in public and private collections internationally. She is currently pursuing a PhD in New Media at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade and lives between Belgrade and Paris.
