Sanja Iveković’s Paper Women
Born in Zagreb, Sanja Iveković’s audacious work as a feminist, activist and video and performance pioneer came of age in the post–1968 period in the former Yugoslavia. In that moment, the artists were breaking free from institutional settings, laying ground for a form of opposition to official culture in an alternative movement known as the New Art Practice.
In Iveković’s early works, she accentuated the socio-political discourse of imagery of women, especially with regards to two institutions specialising in visual politics: the press and television. The series of photographs Paper Women are from this moment: various reproductions of women taken from magazines, with Ivekovićs own interventions in the form of alterations or damage. Faces of female fashion models—archetypal women— are distorted, scratched, pierced and cut. This physical aggression creates a disturbing sense of unease and suggests that the seductiveness of these images rests upon their superficiality, exposing their objectified nature.
Critical Episodes (1957-2011). MACBA Collection
In the framework of L’Internationale
