Sanja Ivekovic was born in Zagreb, in Yugoslavia, in 1949. As soon as she appeared on the Yugoslav artistic scene, she was the first to affirm a feminist position. Her work is a dialogue with her generation’s cultural and social environment. She deals with the question of identity, central to her work, through a relationship between reality and appearances – namely, the influence of the sphere of public media on the private sphere. These concerns assume the form of such varied media as magazines, television, public buildings and so on.

She graduated from the Fine Arts Academy of Zagreb in 1971, along with a whole generation of artists who would also go on to receive wide acclaim – Zagreb was a very dynamic cultural centre in the 1960s and 70s. The teaching was still very classical at this school, whereas the spirit of the age was rebellious. Since 1968, Ivekovic has been part of this circle, known as “New Artistic Practice”, which rejects the modern tradition, accepted as the official art form by Communist Yugoslavia since the 1950s. A fan of Warhol, Sanja Ivekovic was reprimanded by her teachers for her political and artistic position, when, in 1969, she produced an engraving based on a photoengraved press plate representing the portrait of one of the first female Yugoslav politicians.

In 1971, she was invited to the 7th Biennale de Paris for young artists, a large gathering of conceptual artists. There, she was struck by cinema, particularly the freedom of experimental cinema. Two years later, during the exhibition “Audiovisual messages, Trigon 73”, in Graz, she was able to see many videos by American artists, which would profoundly influence her. She directed her first video TV timer, with the collaboration of Dalibor Martinis. Originally, minute-long sequences were supposed to be interjected within television programmes. The idea was to interrupt the daily programme of a national channel. However, the device was only visible in galleries, with an automatically triggered system for these little scenes, in which the artists parody the information system. The use of the media sphere marks a desire to appropriate the techniques of power and subvert them. In 1974, on her return to Zagreb, she pursued a work on video, by borrowing equipment from a primary school.

Her work in the 1970s was based on the specific effects of the media in Tito’s Yugoslavia. At the time, workers were not only seen as citizens, but also as happy consumers in this welfare state, in contrast to the other countries from the Eastern block. In 1976, during her first personal exhibition at a gallery in Zagreb, she published two magazines, pursuing her desire to work with media formats, which were unconventional in the artistic sphere and provided access to a wider audience. Double Life presents two-page spreads with, on one side, an advertisement for women’s magazines and on the other, a photo of the artist in a similar pose, retrieved from her personal photo albums. The whole work operates as a dual image of the same situation, parodying a woman’s identification with the iconography of fashion magazines. Here, once again, she confronts – or even confuses – the private and public spheres. Identification with a fashion magazine raises the issue of identity in general, as a social, cultural and imaginary construct. In the 1970s, editing a magazine involved a rejection of the traditional medium of art; later, this would instead tend to express a desire for infiltration. The magazines of 1976 were reedited and sold in bookshops in 1999.

Since the 1990s, while tensions mounted in the former Yugoslavia, Ivekovic accentuated her political commitment in her work – as in General Alert (Soap Opera), produced in 1995, using sequences recuperated from a Croatian national channel during the bombings in Zagreb. A message of alert was broadcast on national television, advising people to go into shelters. Ivekovic recorded this message, while it was being broadcast on two specific programmes. Melodramatic scenes from a South American soap opera with beautiful young women juxtapose the reality of the tragedy, as does a sequence from Godard’s Breathless, with images of Belmondo, as a film noir actor in the Humphrey Bogart style. The critique of the media and of the genre – played by male and female archetypes – is clearly symbolised in this performative act. Within this very tense context, Ivekovic’s political commitment emerges once again with the use of media images in a subversion from the inside. She uses the media’s own techniques to denounce the ideology of neglect of the history of Socialist heroines, transmitted by the media. Thus, in XX (1997-2001), the photo of a model “stolen” from a perfume advertisement is attributed the name of a “heroine of the nation” in place of its slogan, accompanied by a short biography. The perfection of the portrait attracts the eye: a tragic means of maintaining memory. In the displacement between the model’s beauty and the tragedy recounted in the caption, a feeling of loss and sadness creeps in, since the image of youth and beauty refers to the neglect. As both an informative medium and a critique, these “new advertisements” were reproduced in magazines or in posters, taking the notion of the product to its logical conclusion.

Since the start of the 1980s, she has been a member of numerous non-profit and non-governmental organisations and associations. She also teaches at the Women’s Studies Centre in Zagreb. The idea is not to limit oneself to a single context. She uses all available media, learning much about political, feminist and other activists. In the course of her work, she does not differentiate between her role as an activist, a teacher at the Women’s Studies Centre in Zagreb and her artistic work. For the “Translocation” exhibition in Vienna in 1999, the videos presented stem as much from her work on campaigns organised by women’s organisations, as they do from other activities in collaboration with the Women’s Studies Centre or her artist’s videos. All of this work draws together approaches that are as much pedagogical as they are documentary or purely artistic. The work is not didactic or moralistic, but it poetically reveals flaws in the construction of identity in our societies.

Patricia Maincent