Lot Essay
‘Sanja Ivekovic has over the past four decades developed a critical practice that is crucial to the understanding of the relationship between art, politics, and social change in the contemporary world…Addressing such complex matters in a variety of mediums - conceptual photomontage, video, public sculpture, drawing, posters, performance - she has continually challenged the status quo and the politics of power...Ivekovic taps distinct facets of feminine representation, such as body and face, name and history, biography
and sight, both object for the gaze and a subject gazing out of context, out of the void, defiantly, always still occupying the space
allocated to her’
(R. Marcoci, ‘Art in Transitional Times, Post-1945, 1968, 1989, and 2000 in The Former Yugoslavia’, in Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence, exh. cat, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 9).
A continued project initiated in 1998, Women’s House (Sunglasses) is emblematic of Sanja Ivekovic’s practice confronting issues of gender violence in her native Croatia. Juxtaposing advertisement of well-known brands of sunglasses, such as Hugo Boss and Gucci, with text that illustrates first-person accounts from women suffering from domestic violence, Ivekovic achieves a stark aesthetic to
address complex matters of female identity in the dominant narratives of our collective memory. By appropriating a commercial aesthetic and changing their meaning to a highly politicized one, the present lot poses questions about the role
of the media in the manipulation and continued invisibility of women from the public arena. Women’s House (Sunglasses) echoes the critical and activist approach that Ivekovic demonstrates towards making the violence against women a visible issue to the general public. When asked about the purpose of this long term project, Ivekovic stated ‘each case has its own ‘local’ character, but the ‘universal’ is the violence […] I wanted to redraw the ‘universal’ in such a way that, even though we are witnessing particular cases we are forced to reflect on the values in our own culture and society’ (S. Ivekovic, quoted in ‘Women’s House. Sanja Discusses Recent
Projects (Interview)’, Art Margins,[http:/www.artmargins.com/index.php/5-interviews/541-qwomens-houseq-sanjaivekovic-discusses-recent-projects-interview]).
Ivekovic has often been recognised as the first Croatian (at the time Yugoslavian) artist to openly identity herself as a feminist, a deliberate action employed by the artist as ‘a gesture of disobedience towards the communist regime that treated feminist as a bourgeois import from the West’ (S. Ivekovic, quoted in ‘Women’s House. Sanja Discusses Recent Projects (Interview)’, Art Margins, [http:/www.artmargins.com/index.php/5-interviews/541-qwomens-houseq-sanjaivekovic-discusses-recent-projects-interview]).
and sight, both object for the gaze and a subject gazing out of context, out of the void, defiantly, always still occupying the space
allocated to her’
(R. Marcoci, ‘Art in Transitional Times, Post-1945, 1968, 1989, and 2000 in The Former Yugoslavia’, in Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence, exh. cat, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p. 9).
A continued project initiated in 1998, Women’s House (Sunglasses) is emblematic of Sanja Ivekovic’s practice confronting issues of gender violence in her native Croatia. Juxtaposing advertisement of well-known brands of sunglasses, such as Hugo Boss and Gucci, with text that illustrates first-person accounts from women suffering from domestic violence, Ivekovic achieves a stark aesthetic to
address complex matters of female identity in the dominant narratives of our collective memory. By appropriating a commercial aesthetic and changing their meaning to a highly politicized one, the present lot poses questions about the role
of the media in the manipulation and continued invisibility of women from the public arena. Women’s House (Sunglasses) echoes the critical and activist approach that Ivekovic demonstrates towards making the violence against women a visible issue to the general public. When asked about the purpose of this long term project, Ivekovic stated ‘each case has its own ‘local’ character, but the ‘universal’ is the violence […] I wanted to redraw the ‘universal’ in such a way that, even though we are witnessing particular cases we are forced to reflect on the values in our own culture and society’ (S. Ivekovic, quoted in ‘Women’s House. Sanja Discusses Recent
Projects (Interview)’, Art Margins,[http:/www.artmargins.com/index.php/5-interviews/541-qwomens-houseq-sanjaivekovic-discusses-recent-projects-interview]).
Ivekovic has often been recognised as the first Croatian (at the time Yugoslavian) artist to openly identity herself as a feminist, a deliberate action employed by the artist as ‘a gesture of disobedience towards the communist regime that treated feminist as a bourgeois import from the West’ (S. Ivekovic, quoted in ‘Women’s House. Sanja Discusses Recent Projects (Interview)’, Art Margins, [http:/www.artmargins.com/index.php/5-interviews/541-qwomens-houseq-sanjaivekovic-discusses-recent-projects-interview]).