Nada Prljaʼs work challenges the critical discourse around issues of politics, nationalism, transitional experiences of former socialist countries (and their populations), human rights, and migration. In her work, she engages with the political and historical context of a particular site and situates it within its underlying social context. These themes are also present in her work AUSTRIA(N). Innsbruck becomes the public exhibition space for this intervention, which uses T-shirts hand-painted with the title in the various native languages of immigrants. Prlja thus contests the entrenched notions of national identity and proposes an alternative (expanded) definition of what it means to be Austrian while also defining, isolating, and framing identity as something unique. For her installation Accept and Continue, produced site-specifically for the chapel of St. George in the courtyard of the County of Tyrol, Nada Prlja chose the word for the personal approval of cookies from the 51 most popular newspapers and mounted it on metal bars at eye level.

«We, as internet users need to agree with cookies, if not usually you need to spend a minute of managing cookies for every single webpage, which is daunting work, so everybody agrees, in order to save time, by forcefully agreeing to many things that most of us actually disagree. Therefore I want with this artwork actually to question what we are agreeing with. For me there is something similar between religious vocabulary, e.g. ‹I confess›, ‹You are forgiven› and ‹I accept›, ‹I allow›, ‹Accept and Continue› – words used on cookies buttons. They are both commands, representing interaction between humans and ‹invisible forces›, where the agents of the communications (the priest and website operator) know most innermost facts about us.»

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