Sanja Iveković Research
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In spring 2021, Kontakt commissioned the art historian, curator, and art critic Ivana Bago to research collection artist Sanja Iveković’s activist practice and her unpublished and unexhibited sketches and works. In close collaboration with the artist, Bago looked into these specific aspects of her extensive oeuvre, which has dealt with matters including the representation and status of women in society since the early 1970s.
Sanja Iveković’s private archive is located at her studio in Zagreb and contains the following materials: hand-drawn sketches for realized and unrealized works, early unexhibited works, collections of 35 mm negatives and slides, and documentation of both artistic activity and activist engagement including posters, flyers, newspaper clippings, books, exhibition catalogues, magazines, and other publications. The present research has involved studying and organizing this material in close collaboration with the artist. In terms of quantity, her sketches for unrealized works—public interventions and actions, gallery installations, and video works—make up the lion’s share of the archival material but also pose the greatest challenge since, with rare exceptions, they are undated. This research project organizes them thematically, with approximate dating based on comparison of the sketches with known works and the artist’s preoccupations at certain points in her career. Among the sketches, video storyboards predominate—and these date mostly from the 1980s and early 1990s. The visual material included in this research is a representative selection of the existing material, compiled in agreement with the artist.
This preliminary research in Iveković's archive opens up novel perspectives on the artist’s work and establishes directions for future research. Particularly important is the archival material’s contribution to a better understanding of the connections between Iveković’s seemingly divergent preoccupations and her work across a wide range of forms: urban interventions, collage, performance art, video, participatory art, and activism. The numerous sketches for urban interventions, for example, reveal that Iveković’s interest in public space work was not nearly as random or short-lived as it may have appeared in light of the (so far only two) published works (“Rainbow”, 1971 and “Passage”, 1971) represented in the existing monographs. These sketches also reveal a growing preoccupation with not only spatial interventions, but also citizens’ participation in shaping her artistic oeuvre, a trait that also marks Iveković’s and Martinis’s first video work, “TV Timer” (1973), which was realized for Trigon ’73 in Graz. When such connections are made, Iveković’s “shift” from urban interventions to video is shown to be one that was instantiated simply due to the available technical and medium-based possibilities rather than born of a fundamental shift in her artistic thinking, which has been grounded from the very beginning in detecting and establishing relationships and seeking points of convergence between divergent social and aesthetic practices.
This relational aspect is then evident in works that take the artist’s subjectivity as a starting point, such as her video works and the famous collage series of the mid-1970s. Numerous sketches for gallery installations reveal Iveković’s preoccupation—beyond her well-known performances such as “Meeting Points” (1978) and “1st Belgrade Performance” (1978)—with the politics and conventions of exhibiting, which the installation sketches often examine through a prism of the relationship between culture and nature (including the animal world). The interest in politics already appears in her earliest experiments while still at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts in 1970, with prints inspired by Andy Warhol’s preoccupation with women celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, a preoccupation that Iveković “translates” by zooming in on the local female political “celebrity” Savka Dabčević Kučar. Iveković’s concern with political speech and the mass communication media that facilitate it, especially television, is also present from her earliest experiments with video, alongside an understanding of video as enabling both artistic and civic intervention in the governmental and commercial discourses. The development of civil society in Croatia amidst conditions of the traumatizing post-war and post-socialist transitions enabled Iveković to truly merge art and politics, which she did by means of her engagement in the work of numerous women’s activist groups and by forming Elektra – Women’s Art Center, her own non-governmental organization. The present research has resulted in an initial systematic organization and description of that material, which can now serve as a basis for future explorations of not only Iveković’s artistic output but also its connections to the local and international artistic and activist scenes.
Ivana Bago
https://kontakt-collection.org/people/28/ivekovic-sanja/objects
Sanja Iveković’s private archive is located at her studio in Zagreb and contains the following materials: hand-drawn sketches for realized and unrealized works, early unexhibited works, collections of 35 mm negatives and slides, and documentation of both artistic activity and activist engagement including posters, flyers, newspaper clippings, books, exhibition catalogues, magazines, and other publications. The present research has involved studying and organizing this material in close collaboration with the artist. In terms of quantity, her sketches for unrealized works—public interventions and actions, gallery installations, and video works—make up the lion’s share of the archival material but also pose the greatest challenge since, with rare exceptions, they are undated. This research project organizes them thematically, with approximate dating based on comparison of the sketches with known works and the artist’s preoccupations at certain points in her career. Among the sketches, video storyboards predominate—and these date mostly from the 1980s and early 1990s. The visual material included in this research is a representative selection of the existing material, compiled in agreement with the artist.
This preliminary research in Iveković's archive opens up novel perspectives on the artist’s work and establishes directions for future research. Particularly important is the archival material’s contribution to a better understanding of the connections between Iveković’s seemingly divergent preoccupations and her work across a wide range of forms: urban interventions, collage, performance art, video, participatory art, and activism. The numerous sketches for urban interventions, for example, reveal that Iveković’s interest in public space work was not nearly as random or short-lived as it may have appeared in light of the (so far only two) published works (“Rainbow”, 1971 and “Passage”, 1971) represented in the existing monographs. These sketches also reveal a growing preoccupation with not only spatial interventions, but also citizens’ participation in shaping her artistic oeuvre, a trait that also marks Iveković’s and Martinis’s first video work, “TV Timer” (1973), which was realized for Trigon ’73 in Graz. When such connections are made, Iveković’s “shift” from urban interventions to video is shown to be one that was instantiated simply due to the available technical and medium-based possibilities rather than born of a fundamental shift in her artistic thinking, which has been grounded from the very beginning in detecting and establishing relationships and seeking points of convergence between divergent social and aesthetic practices.
This relational aspect is then evident in works that take the artist’s subjectivity as a starting point, such as her video works and the famous collage series of the mid-1970s. Numerous sketches for gallery installations reveal Iveković’s preoccupation—beyond her well-known performances such as “Meeting Points” (1978) and “1st Belgrade Performance” (1978)—with the politics and conventions of exhibiting, which the installation sketches often examine through a prism of the relationship between culture and nature (including the animal world). The interest in politics already appears in her earliest experiments while still at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts in 1970, with prints inspired by Andy Warhol’s preoccupation with women celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, a preoccupation that Iveković “translates” by zooming in on the local female political “celebrity” Savka Dabčević Kučar. Iveković’s concern with political speech and the mass communication media that facilitate it, especially television, is also present from her earliest experiments with video, alongside an understanding of video as enabling both artistic and civic intervention in the governmental and commercial discourses. The development of civil society in Croatia amidst conditions of the traumatizing post-war and post-socialist transitions enabled Iveković to truly merge art and politics, which she did by means of her engagement in the work of numerous women’s activist groups and by forming Elektra – Women’s Art Center, her own non-governmental organization. The present research has resulted in an initial systematic organization and description of that material, which can now serve as a basis for future explorations of not only Iveković’s artistic output but also its connections to the local and international artistic and activist scenes.
Ivana Bago
https://kontakt-collection.org/people/28/ivekovic-sanja/objects