MoMA Presents First U.S. Retrospective of the Work of SANJA IVEKOVIC: SWEET VIOLENCE 12/18

The Museum of Modern Art presents SANJA IVEKOVI?: SWEET VIOLENCE, the first retrospective in the United States of the artist's work, from December 18, 2011, to March 26, 2012. The exhibition covers four decades of Ivekovi?'s audacious work as feminist, activist, and video and performance pioneer. Ivekovi? (b. 1949, Zagreb) came of age in the post-1968 period, at a time when artists broke free from mainstream institutional settings, laying ground for a form of opposition to official culture. In the 1970s Ivekovi? probed the persuasive qualities of mass media and its identity-forging potential, and after 1990-with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the birth of a new nation-she focused on the transformation of reality from communist to post-communist political systems. Ivekovi?'s work offers a view into the politics of power, gender roles, and the paradoxes inherent in society's collective memory. The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition includes over 100 works, presenting the full range of the artist's practice in all mediums-from conceptual photomontage to video, social sculpture, performance, and drawing. The artist's monumental sculptural installation Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001) will be featured in The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium on the second floor. The works presented in the exhibition's third-floor galleries include a group of single-channel videos that the Museum has recently acquired, including Sweet Violence (1974), Instructions No. 1 (1976), Make Up - Make Down (1978), Personal Cuts (1982), Practice Makes a Master (1982), and General Alert (Soap Opera) (1995), as well as a selection of photomontages from Ivekovi?'s celebrated series Double Life (1975-76). Additionally, the artist's performance piece Practice Makes a Master (1982) will be reenacted on three occasions prior to the opening of the exhibition.

December 18, 2011-March 26, 2012
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor

Sanja Ivekovic's 18-minute performance piece Practice Makes a Master (1982), a compelling study of the rehearsal of violence, will be reenacted by dancer Sonja Pregrad on the following days:
Monday, December 12, 8:00 p.m. Wednesday, December 14, 5:00 p.m. Thursday, December 15, 7:00 p.m.
All performances are in Classroom B in The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, 4 West 54 Street. Tickets are free of charge and can be obtained starting November 12 at the lobby information desk, at the film desk, or online.

SANJA IVEKOVIC: SWEET VIOLENCE is accompanied by a major publication that weaves together art-historical analysis and political theory. Essays by curator Roxana Marcoci and literary critic Terry Eagleton offer a critical examination of the neo-avant-garde in the former Yugoslavia and provide a philosophical context for investigating urgent issues such as women's rights, political activism, and collaborative strategies in art. Hardcover. 192 pages. 257 illustrations. Price: $50.00. Available at the MoMA Stores and online, and to the trade through ARTBOOK D.A.P in the United States and Canada.