Sanja Iveković: Women's House

Women’s House, presents the solo exhibition and personal archive of Sanja Iveković. A pioneer of video, performance, and conceptual art in Yugoslavia during the 1970s, Iveković is renowned for her feminist examination of gender relations within the socialist Yugoslavia and the post-socialist transition. The exhibition consists of two parts, a selection of the artist’s works, curated by Hana Halilaj and spanning fifty years of the artist’s practice, and an archival exhibition based on the research of Iveković’s archive, curated by Ivana Bago.

Meeting Points: Documents in the Making, 1968–1982, takes its cue from Iveković’s first major solo show Documents 1949–76 in 1976 in Zagreb, in which the artist purported to “document” her personal history while constructing a critical history of the present. Based on Ivana Bago’s year-long research of Iveković’s practice, the exhibition spans the years between Iveković’s study at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts during the student revolts of 1968 to the mounting crisis of Yugoslav socialism in the early 1980s. It is structured as a visual essay, where curatorial narration is placed on the same plane as the artist’s works (including their fragments and reproductions), and archival materials, which include drawings, sketches, notes, photographs, letters, exhibition posters, books, and magazines. The eleven chronologically arranged chapters shift the focus from the curatorial and market attention given to a relatively small number of Iveković’s feminist works made in the second half of the 1970s to show her distinctly experimental and versatile approach to art making, as well as her critical positioning within the ideological and institutional structures of Yugoslav socialism and the increasingly globalized artworld of the 1970s. At a time when a growing number of organizations are set up to deal with archiving and preserving the legacies of Eastern European artists of Iveković’s generation, Meeting Points provides one possible activation of “documents” about the socialist past, while posing a question about their future and our relation to the legacies they encapsulate.

The second exhibition Temporalities of Hope curated by Hana Halilaj, presents a grouping of Iveković’s works that examine gendered politics and the representation of women in mass media. Bringing to the fore the ways in which women’s social roles are framed for consumerism, the selected works map how this shift has occurred from the socialist past to present-day mass communications. Further, the exhibition scrutinizes the omitted histories of the women’s active participation in the Yugoslav WW2 anti-fascist struggle, and the erasure from the collective memory of the Women’s Antifascist Front in all post-Yugoslav states, including Kosovo. As an activist artist, Iveković engages with gender inequities and the persistence of domestic violence. The series Women’s House (1998- ongoing), presents five plaster casts of the faces of women living in shelters for survivors of domestic abuse, which Iveković produced during a workshop in Peja, Kosovo in 2004. Set on pedestals, each face tells stories that attest to the pertinence of these issues and women’s continued struggle for their rights. The strength of Iveković’s legacy lies in her careful navigation of the historical and political realities that she has witnessed, while simultaneously highlighting their universal relevance.

Although providing different approaches to Iveković’s work, the two exhibitions are united by a desire to present this work as an empowering legacy, to be used as inspiration in addressing the complex realities of the post-Yugoslav space, and beyond. Under the common title, Women’s House, and curated by two post-Yugoslav art historians of different generations, these presentations of Iveković’s art transform the National Gallery of Kosovo into a “house” of transgenerational and empowering encounters. 

Meeting Points: Documents in the Making, 1968–1982 is presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, where it was originally presented in 2023.