Sanja Iveković

Biography

On 10 May 1979 a column of cars carrying Josip Broz Tito, who was visiting Zagreb, moved slowly along the street beneath Sanja Iveković’s windows. The artist came out onto the balcony of her flat on Savska Street, sat down on a chair, put a glass of whisky, a packet of cigarettes and several foreign books beside her, and began to read Tom Bottomore’s sociological study of elites. She knew that officers of the secret police were watching her from the roof of the hotel opposite. Eighteen minutes later someone rang the doorbell and demanded that she stop. The work is called “Triangle”.

She was born on 6 January 1949 in Zagreb, then part of Yugoslavia.

From 1968 to 1971 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb; by some accounts she graduated in 1970, by others in 1971, and in 1970 her first solo exhibition took place at the Student Centre Gallery, where she turned the room into an interactive environment of painted pipes. She began in the years of the Croatian Spring, among young artists who rejected the prevailing tastes and chose video, conceptual photomontage and performance. In the history of Croatian art this generation is linked with the notion of the “New Artistic Practice”. From 1973, together with Dalibor Martinis, she laid the foundations of video art in Croatia. In 1972–1976 Iveković did graphic design for programmes on Television Zagreb, and from 1976 she worked only in video and performance. Some of her video works were made during a stay in Canada in 1978. Her first video, “Sweet Violence” (1974), is simple in construction: in front of a television showing an economic propaganda programme, she placed a black grille like that of a prison. In “Double Life” (1975–1976) her private photographs from 1953 to 1976 are paired with magazine photographs of models similar in pose and setting; under each is the source and date. In “Make Up – Make Down” (1978) the camera films her hands and neckline while the artist slowly applies make-up, her face kept out of the frame. She tore, scratched and pierced glossy advertisements, and in the series “My Scar. My Signature” she left the prints of lipstick-covered lips on magazine pages.

In 1982 Television Zagreb broadcast her video “Personal Cuts”. She pulls a black stocking over her head and cuts holes in it with scissors, uncovering her face piece by piece; each cut is interspersed with television footage about Yugoslavia, shot shortly after Tito’s death: rallies, the marshal’s speeches, monuments. By the end the face is fully revealed. To my mind, it is her most exact work on how the personal intrudes into official history.

Iveković was one of the first in Croatia to declare herself a feminist artist; Vlasta Delimar is named alongside her. In 1994 she became one of the founders of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb, where she teaches, and she also took part in creating the women’s art centre ELEKTRA and other women’s organisations. After the collapse of the socialist system her theme shifted to the consequences of the move to a market economy and to the forgotten antifascist heritage. In “Gen XX” (1997–2001) the commercial text is removed from advertising portraits of fashion models, and they are captioned with the names of antifascist women executed during the war: Dragica Končar, Nada Dimić, Anka Butorac, the Baković sisters. In the project “Women’s House (Sunglasses)”, which has been running since 1998, short texts about women who have suffered violence are inserted into advertisements for well-known brands of sunglasses; it has been shown in Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Thailand and Turkey, each time with an emphasis on local inequality.

Her best-known public project is connected with Luxembourg. At Manifesta 2 in 1998 she proposed removing the gilded Nike, the war memorial known as Gëlle Fra (the “Golden Lady”), from its obelisk and putting a shelter for women who had suffered violence in its place; the proposal was judged too controversial. In 2001 she was allowed to do something different: beside the original stood a life-size copy, called “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg”, a pregnant figure, and on the plinth, instead of the former plaque, were texts in three languages, among them “WHORE, BITCH, MADONNA, VIRGIN”. Arguments flared in the newspapers, on television and on the internet, and there were calls for the minister of culture to resign. The documents of this episode became part of the work itself.

In 2005, in the Austrian town of Rohrbach, she staged the “Rohrbach Living Memorial”: residents stood in the square from early morning until noon, re-enacting a scene from a photograph of the 1940s showing the deportation of Roma and Sinti. At the Gwangju Biennale in 2010 “On the Barricades” was staged in a similar way, in memory of the uprising of 18 May 1980: volunteers played statues of the victims, and around them stood ten monitors with photographs of 545 dead, whose eyes the artist had closed. At documenta 14 in 2017 she rebuilt, from old bricks in a square in Athens, the foundation of a lost 1926 monument by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In 2009 Iveković received the Camera Austria Award of the city of Graz. In 2011–2012 her exhibition “Sweet Violence” was shown at MoMA in New York, and in 2014 she was shortlisted for the Artes Mundi prize. In 2023 the exhibition “Works of Heart (1970–2023)” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and in the same year the Sanja Iveković Institute was founded.