A semantic analysis of the title of the women.index project will reveal the particular method of research employed in the work of Andreja Kulunčić. The first part of the formulation, the word index, is a signifier with manifold potentials for interpretation. On the one hand, it suggests a method for research into public opinion via viral strategies that produce certain statistical results; on the other hand, in terms of content, it indicates a certain property of some target group in the body of society, labelled as the subject of the research. In the case of the project women.index it is clear that the social grouping in the focus of the research is gender-defined, and that the artist wishes, in the whole of the campaign being carried out in the media space, to analyse the way in which women are perceived in a given context in their roles in the family, society and the public.

The poll and media campaign conducted over the period of a month in Belgrade showed that 34% of women felt satisfied, an alarming 38% abused, and 28% felt discriminated against. The artist arrived at these statistical results through a process of collaboration and joint creation of all the elements of the campaign with networks she had established with professionals of various profiles (theorists, designers, experts in marketing and so on). The first question that at once appeared in the discussions with academic circles was whether the questionnaire covered a sufficiently representative sample of society for it to have scientific validity or whether it was just about an art project. Could the statistics really refer to symptoms to be found in Serbian society and could art do anything more than create a framework for discussion and visualisation and then document the research process in an art gallery?
After such questions, the art was immediately placed in the field of social activities without obligation or responsibility to the object of the search that it took up, which in this case is only the field of "social", and not, in the way they are usually understood, of "aesthetic" problems. Here lies the key for further analysis and interpretation of art practices that take up and incorporate in their strategy the methodologies of other, frequently scientific, disciplines, so as to be able to give a critical reflection of social problems.

Lying behind a methodology set up in this way and then systematically and analytically applied is the socially aware position of an artist who is engaged in the revelation and unmasking of problems and anomalies in various social contexts. In her work, Andreja Kunlunčić focuses on the sore points of different societies, their burning problems, and attempts to return them, via and with the help of the art system, to the field of the social. And so the right answer to the question whether socially engaged art works within or outside the system of art is that such artistic practices actually bridge the gap and link up the endemic field, the oasis in which, for the general public, hermetic and inaccessible contemporary art practice works and the media-affected, post-ideological social sphere that is perceived by every individual.

Andreja Kulunčić takes as her point of departure the positions of almost-always-marginalised individuals and their interactions in concrete social frameworks, not making a plea for the re-establishment through art of broken social bonds. This position represents the viewpoint that in a post-utopian society community represents what is actually an elusive, unavowable and inoperative phantom concept, or construct, and that every attempt to set up this macro-community has to count on its own inherent failure. This fact does not prevent the artist from actively working in society, from thinking through and launching in the public sphere a debate about the social problems observed.

For the artist, more important than the actual detection of the problems is the opening up of new possibilities for the creation of relations and interactions among the diverse agents that are active within the field of the problem established. The artist works as mediator who produces specific, often paradoxical or inverse situations and constellations that will perhaps be able to activate, raise awareness or perhaps empower the actors themselves to bring about a redefinition of current hegemonic relations in society and shake from inside the foundations on which these relations are based. With this kind of approach, Andreja Kulunčić occupies a rather particular position in the framework of the wider complex of socially oriented art practices characterised as community based art, activist art, social aesthetics, dialogical or participatory art. In the concrete case of the context of Belgrade and Serbia the subject of analysis is the issue of gender equality, for in a patriarchal society in which the process of re-traditionalisation is increasingly to be observed, many stereotypes related to gender problems are still prevalent in the public sphere. Through this prism, the whole of Andreja Kulunčić's individual exhibition can be considered; within this framework, the artist deals in various ways with the problem of social segregation and marginalised groups such as illegal immigrants in Switzerland (1CHF = 1 VOICE), patients in a psychiatric hospital in Zagreb (Within) or discriminated foreign workers in Austria (Austrians Only), the thread that binds together all the works presented being gender determination.

Zoran Erić