MoMA Presents Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence 12/18-3/26/11

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. This 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 art. 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 features the full range of the artist's work, including single-channel videos and video installations, performances, sculptures, photomontages, and drawings. The artist's monumental sculptural installation Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001) will be featured in The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium with documentation of its original public presentation and critical reception. Among the other works presented are 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 (1982/2009), and General Alert (Soap Opera) (1995), as well as a selection of photomontages from Ivekovi?'s celebrated series Double Life (1975-76), for which the artist juxtaposed pictures of herself from her private albums with commercial ads clipped from the pages of women's magazines such as Elle, Grazia, Brigitte, and Svijet. Additionally, the artist's performance piece Practice Makes a Master will be reenacted at specially announced times leading up to the opening of the exhibition.

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