Sanja Iveković

Seen this summer in Paris, elles@centrepompidou.
"Diary, 1976"






Another, very 70's feminist work :

Double life, 1975


"Dvostruki zivot (Double life, 1975) is a series of 66 pairs of photographs where snapshots from her personal album are placed side by side with images of women from women's magazines, paired according to the similarity in their appearances, figures, accessories and situations. The emphasis on the parallelism between the mass media and the private photographs blurs the distinction between original and copy, between model and representation, and invites us to think about the nature and origin of the stereotypes of femininity. Is it the mass media that appropriate expressions, poses and attitudes which are typical of female behaviour or is it women who, under the influence of those media constructs, have ended up adopting them? Ivekovic suggests the influence of the mass media in the shaping of feminine stereotypes and turns them into elements of identity. "

More recent work (Gen XX, 1997-2001) :



"Sanja Iveković's project Gen XX has been realised as advertisements published in various magazines. The women in the photographs are professional models whose faces are familiar to the contemporary audience, while the text accompanying the photos presents National Heroines known to the generations that lived in socialist ex-Yugoslavia, but have been completely erased from the contemporary collective consciousness. The manoeuvre that Sanja Iveković performs within the Gen XX media action consists of appropriating the media talk and subverting it by its own means. Using the media is always a manipulation, a technical treatment of the given material with a particular goal in mind. When the technical intervention is of immediate social relevance, manipulation is a political act (which it is by default within the media industry). Gen XX turns this commonly accepted fact into its advantage, appealing to people's sophistication, addressing a 'target group' that takes pleasure in being taken seriously and should not be left to advertising.(2) Gen XX gives lessons in both history and media dwelling in the imaginary space that shapes the formation of the public. Its subversive tactics do not reside in the practice of provocation but in its accommodation to the social codes and conventions of everyday life informed by mass culture.It is a certain translation from a specialised language into the media code, re-translated by media recipients into their own language of the every-day. The effectiveness of its communication strategy consists of this translation based on the analysis of the moment of performance and transmission of knowledge in relation to the moment of the conception and of the research itself."

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