THE BLACK FILE - COLLAGE

About the Croatian artist Sanja Iveković, who will be represented at documenta 12 in Kassel this year.

Since its beginnings, Sanja Iveković’s artistic endeavor has moved 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.” Using performative practices, Iveković has investigated the relationship between the seemingly valid image of the real and an undefinable, unrepresentable real (Phelan names it the “Unmarkable”). This holds true for both her conceptual photo and text work as well as for her videos and video installations and logically also for her actions. It is decisive that the artist brings herself into play as the protagonist, especially in her early work. However, in the work of the last two decades she has, in the sense of a stronger political activism, increasingly retreated into the background, appearing less in her work in performance or in depiction.  It lies in the logic of this artistic approach that the symbolic, political and social field that Iveković presents to us defines itself in a gender context and that the relationship between “the man” and “the woman” proves to be asymmetrical. Iveković works with double strategies (like those described above for “Personal Cuts”). 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. Iveković follows “the woman” in the wide field of media representation, using her method of “personal cuts” to reveal empty spaces that the signifier “woman” continually highlights as it traverses this field under a host of various circumstances. She is just as likely to appropriate the images of cosmetics advertising (e.g. “Double Life”, “Eight Tears”, “Diary”) or of the glamour industry (“Tragedy of a Venus”, “Sweet Life”) as she is to make use of newspaper crime reports (“Bitter Life”) or notices regarding missing young women (“The Black File”). The work entitled “The Black File” (1975–1978), which as an exhibition object is presented like a police file, confronts 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 (Stefania: 14 anni).

Silvia Eiblmayr is an art historian, author, the director of Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck (A) and member of the international jury for
„Kontakt – The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group“.

Sanja Iveković

born 1949 in Zagreb, Croatia
lives and works in Zagreb / Croatia

Exhibitions (selection)

2007   
documenta 12
Kassel, D
2005   
Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970,
Tate Modern, London, GB
2005   
Die Regierung. Paradiesische Handlungs-räume,
Secession, Wien, A
2004   
Women’s Room
Palazzo Ferreri, Genova, IT
2002    documenta 11, 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, SW
1998   
Manifesta 2
Luxembourg, LU
1987   
documenta 8
Kassel, D
1984   
Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn. Internationale -Ausstellung aktueller Kunst von Frauen,
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien,
20er Haus, A
1976   
Documents 1949–1976,
Galerija suvremene umjetnosti [Contemporary Art Gallery], Zagreb, HR
Bibliografie (Auswahl) / Selected Bibliography

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

Sanja Iveković. Personal Cuts,
ed. Silvia Eiblmayr , 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,
ed.Tihomir Milovac , Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, 2002.

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