Sanja Iveković (B. 1949)

A lifelong feminist and activist, Sanja Ivekovic has been continuously exploring the crossroads of art, politics and social change. From her early 1970s performances and videos,such as ‘Sweet Violence’ from 1974, also the title of her major retrospective at MoMA in New York in 2011, to her iconic collages, drawings and photographs, Ivekovic’s artwork continues to investigate how politics, gender roles, and the creation of identities has shaped our collective memories. She once said, ‘The important advantage of living and working within socialism is that you learn very early on that nothing is free from ideology, everything we do has a political charge and the division between politics and aesthetics is entirely erroneous. I think my work reflects that’ (S. Ivekovic, quoted in, ‘Q & A: Sanja Ivekovic’, in Dazed Digital, reproduced at http:/www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/15244/1/ qa-sanja-ivekovic). The present work clearly comes from this investigation. During presidential or state parades, it was strictly forbidden for civilians to stand in balconies for security reasons. Here, Ivekovic found an old newspaper article of one such parade, highlighting in the primary colours squares of a Modernist building where the spectators who have clearly disobeyed this directive. Ivekovic points to a patriarchal and state order, exposing peoples’ passive spectatorship of brazen military exhibitionism.