Sanja Iveković

In this work, Iveković stares into the video camera and uses its lens as a mirror as she methodically draws arrows in black ink on her face and neck. Negating the everyday ritual of applying makeup, the artist mocks the “how-to” language of advertising with stoic intensity, evoking instead the application of war paint. When she attempts to rub the ink away—or massage it into her skin—it leaves behind a smeared, grimy residue. The work is both a comment on the unrealistic standards of feminine beauty enforced by mass media and a protest against the systematic implementation
of gender codes in consumer society.

Iveković began her art career in the late 1960s at the height of the Croatian Spring, a cultural revolution propelled by calls for social, political, and economic reform, during which many artists and thinkers began making work in direct opposition to mainstream institutional norms and state-sanctioned art. Part of a generation of artists in the former Yugoslavia known as the Nova Umjetnička Praksa, or New Art Practice, Iveković has employed conceptual photomontage, video, performance, and public art to critically analyze the politics of power and transcend cultural boundaries. Iveković is known as the first artist to publicly identify as feminist in Croatia, in what she has described as “a gesture of disobedience toward the Communist regime that treated feminism as a bourgeois import from the West.”