The MOMA in New York opens its doors to the works of Sanja Ivekovic. The United States welcomes for the first time a retrospective of the 40 years of production by the recognized Croatian artist, which can be visited until the 26th of March in New York.
Born in Zagreb in 1949, Iveković grew up and developed her artistic career in the most turbulent years of the old Yugoslavia. She lived directly under the dictatorship of Mariscal Tito, the fall of the communism, the disintegration of the country and the violence of the civil war. Affined with the New Art Practice, she formed part of the generation of artists of the early 70´s of formed the official art. However, she remained also outside the commercial circuit, unlike other artists like Marina Abramovic.
Iveković developed what she herself called “public artworks”, in the form of “photocollages”, videos and pionering performances in her time, that where inserted into magazines or became the word on the street. In the eyes of the curator of the exhibition, Roxana Marconi, she could be considered as the first female artist from Yugoslavia.
Her sharp and clear reflections about the structure of power, genre, voilence, the intervention of the state into personal privacy, the collective memory or the influence of the mass media, are built through a powerful visual and graphic language, mkaing social activism and aesthetic exercise.
The exposion, Sweet Violence, takes its name from one of the earliest and most famous videos of Sanja Iveković, in 1974, which also includes the sample with the audiovisual work like Personal Cuts (1982) or Rohrbach Living Memorial (2005) and a hundred photocollages as the series Double Life (1975-76), in which the artist herself constrasted images of herself from her personal album with other photographs taken from other women’s magazines.
In addition, reviews of more recent projects like Women´s House (sunglasses), a multimedia initative launched in 2022 with the object to denounce violence against women.
Incisive and a committed feminist, Sanja Iveković wrote on the most raw and refined texts about Power of our time.
www.moma.org
Bárbara Muriel
