Sanja Ivekovi: Sweet Violence
The first museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Sanja Ivekovi (b. 1949, Zagreb) covers four decades of the artist's remarkable career. A feminist, activist, and video pioneer, Ivekovi? came of age in the post-1968 period, when artists broke free from mainstream institutional settings, laying the ground for a form of praxis antipodal to official art. Part of the generation known as the Nova Umjetni?ka Praksa (New Art Practice), Ivekovi? produced works of cross-cultural resonance that range from conceptual photomontages to video and performance.
While in the 1970s Ivekovi? probed the persuasive qualities of mass media and its identity-forging potential, after 1990—following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the birth of a new nation—she focused on the transformation of reality from socialist to post-socialist political systems. Ivekovi? offers a fascinating view into the official politics of power, gender roles, and the paradoxes inherent in society's collective memory. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Through March 26, 2012
Sanja Ivekovi?. Personal Cuts. 1982. Video (black and white and color, sound), 3:40 min.
Organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.
