Since its beginnings, Sanja Iveković’s artistic endeavor has been in the field of diverse “politics of performance” that the theoretician Peggy Phelan identifies as strategies for a critique of the ideologies of the visible.
“Performance, insofar as it can be defined as representation without reproduction,” she writes, “can be seen as a model for another representational economy, one in which the reproduction of the Other as the Same is not assured.” Iveković works with double strategies She uses the performative potential of the mass media, of magazines and newspapers, of advertising, of “public” and — very decisively—also of “private” photography in order to bring her own person into play in the broad field of representation as a structural reference figure. The work entitled The Black File (1975–1978), which, as an exhibition object, is presented like a police file, confronts on a double page everyday missing-person notices from newspapers—containing the name and description of a missing young woman under a photo—with erotic magazine portraits of very young women, whereby the caption includes only a female first name and the age.

Sanja Iveković
* 1949, Zagreb, Croatia
lives and works in Zagreb/ Croatia

Exhibitions (selection)

2005 „Open Systems: Rethiking Art c.1970“, Tate Modern, London, GB

2005 „Die Regierung“ . Paradiesische Handlungsräume. Secession, Wien, A

2004 „Women's Room“, Palazzo Ferreri, Genova, I

2002 „Documenta11“, Kassel, D

2001 „Personal Cuts“, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, A

2000 „S.O.S. Nada Dimić“, Galerija Karas, Zagreb, HR

2000 What, How and for Whom, HDLU, House of Croatian Visual Artists, Zagreb, HR

1999 „After The Wall“, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, S

1998 „Manifesta 2“, Luxembourg, FL

1987 „Documenta 8“, Kassel, D

1984 „Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn. Internationale Ausstellung aktueller Kunst von Frauen“, MMKSLW. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 20er Haus, A

1976 „Documents 1949 – 1976“, Galerija suvremene umjetnosti [Contemporary Art Gallery], Zagreb, HR

selected bibliography

Sanja Iveković. Is this my True face, (ed. Tihomir Milovac), Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, 1998.

Sanja Iveković. Personal Cuts, Silvia Eiblmayr (ed.), Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 2001.

Double Life, in Primary Documents, A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, MOMA, New York, 2002.

Sanja Iveković, Women's House 1998 – 2002, Tihomir Milovac (ed.), Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, 2002.

Ilić, Nataša: „Teaching private politics“, in Camera Austria, 90, 2005.