In recent times Sanja Iveković has often been singled out as one of the most important artists of her generation. But if we move away from the sphere of PR talk, it is hard to give a straightforward answer to the question of whether that is really the case - not because we doubt she is a good artist or dismiss the relevance of her work, but because, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton, there is no artist whose work can be considered 'great' or 'important' (or anything, for that matter) outside of the context of the social institution that makes it 'great'. The context in which art operates determines the position from which the work is to be taken into account at all, and in the case of post-communist countries, this position is not particularly favourable. That is exactly the problem that artists from Eastern Europe faced after the collapse of the so-called 'socialist regimes': how to find their own place within the new situation, after the return of 'real capitalism'?

How to enter the mechanisms of an art market that until then had not existed? In other words, the question of what the role of art is within society was re-actualised. Any attempts to incorporate an artist's work within the western system are rendered problematic by the fact that art history is in the hands of just a few - those who can claim the right to speak in the name of a set of universal values against which all art needs to be measured. During recent years, increased interest in the art of the region of South-Eastern Europe (or, as it is usually and inaccurately called, the Balkans) almost always suffers from certain deterministic and essentialist traits. What makes this art interesting for a western gaze in the first place is its ambivalent position: it belongs to the corpus of 'western' art, but at the same time it is (still) largely excluded from its system. It was mostly produced outside of the market, at the margins of its structure, and was always aware of its social context and politically engaged (partly because during 'real socialism' political engagement was often channelled through culture, as there was no other formal framework such as multi-party parliamentary politics or non-governmental associations).

This parallel art world, which for years existed outside the western art market, is the context in which Sanja Ivekovic has been working since the early 1970s. It was a phenomenon specific to institutions within a socialist system that provided opportunities for exhibiting, but rarely supported production of more demanding works. That resulted in the development of conceptual and 'poor' art, as well as ideas of 'artistic life' (as the concrete materialisation of Marx's idea of communist life in the form of communes or 'communities' formed around artist-run spaces and institutions, such as Zagreb's Gallery of Student Centre, Podroom or Gallery of Extended Media). After Tito's 1948 split with Stalin, the modernist canon was adopted as 'official' art in the former Yugoslavia, but since the late 1960s an alternative, unofficial artistic movement called 'new art practice' developed. At the beginning of the 1980s the situation changed, and the new conditions allowed artists to step out of the logic of the modernist system. Although there were some contacts with international platforms, and foreign artists and curators visited Yugoslavia while some local artists exhibited abroad, this did not result in any significant increase in the interest for local art production. That was due in part to insufficient local infrastructure to increase the international exposure of certain artists. But responsibility also lies with the West, which treated the local art scene as a provincial repetition of developments that had already taken place in the global art centres. (This was probably true in some cases, but as an effect of such reading these relations were actually favoured).

Although Sanja Ivekovic was taking part in international exhibitions in the early 1970s (for example, within the 'regional' show 'Trigon' in Graz in 1972, where she and other Croatian artists had access to video equipment for the first time), her 'breakthrough' in the Western art scene had to wait until the late 1990s, in the midst of the process of cultural reintegration of Eastern Europe.

*

In many of Ivekovic's works from the 1970s national symbols and state representation figure prominently, but her main concern is not anti-communist dissidence. Rather, it is the relations between gender and power seen from a feminist perspective. Her position was one of political engagement - not as a battle against the 'darkness' of communist totalitarianism, but as a fight for the complete self-realisation of individuals and culture against actual bureaucratic limitations (paradoxically for a state whose official ideology was 'self-management'). It could be said that she took socialist ideology more seriously than the cynical political elite did.

Her works from this time deal with the specific effects of media in socialist Yugoslavia. They expose the mechanisms by which difference and inclusion/exclusion are produced within a regime that claimed to be the embodiment of workers' rights. In that regard, the works are about the intersection where individual identity gets entangled with the net of differences produced by a variety of social orders. They are as much a critique of socialism (as a social order that claimed to represent human rights as equated to workers' rights) as an investigation of confused identities caused by a media overflow that blurs the differences between reality and its mediations.

Double Life (1975) is a series of pairs of photographs, each matching an image from a magazine advertisement with another from the artist's own private archives with similar content or formal composition. This emphasis on the parallels between media and private photographs erases the distinction between original and copy, between a model and its representation, between what was before and what follows, and exposes how media pressures shape private experiences and permeates our individual identities. A similar method of pairing media images and personal photographs was used in works such as Sweet Life (1975-76), where Ivekovi? juxtaposed photographs and captions from the tabloid columns of daily newspapers with photographs from her private albums, or Bitter Life (1975), where she paired personal images with photographs from the crime sections of newspapers.

Media treatment makes people and events appear appealing, interesting, dramatic and desirable. The life of the artist appears almost glamorous, and it isn't difficult to imagine it on the pages of a newspaper or magazine. But Ivekovic was well aware of the marginalisation of any artistic practice that had drifted away from painting, sculpture and graphics, and, herself one of the main actors within the 'new-art practice' movement, was equally aware of the general marginalisation of artists and intellectuals within 1970s Yugoslavia. In those series of appropriation works, there are no interventions made to the images themselves; rather the images are ordered in pairs in order to suggest new narratives that refer not only to gender construction in the context of the equality of the sexes proclaimed by socialism, but also to the frustrations of the never-satisfied consumer longing of the socialist worker-consumer - the consumers' inclinations are the key difference between the Yugoslav model of non-aligned, self-management socialism and the regimes of other countries of the Eastern bloc. Simply put, the media material used in these works stresses that, unlike other countries of the Eastern bloc, workers in Titoist Yugoslavia were not realised only as political subjects, but also as happy consumers in a welfare state. And it was exactly this discrepancy between, on the one hand, the colourful and self-content picture that society had of itself and projected to the outside world, and on the other the reality of deepening social inequalities and conflicts that intensified to a point of no return: it could only be resolved by a process of nationalistic self-absorption that culminated in war at the beginning of the 1990s.

These contradictions of state-socialism are powerfully exposed in Triangle (1979), a work in which the artist positions the personal within the political, and shifts and tests the borders between them. The piece consists of four photographs depicting President Tito on his car during an official visit to Zagreb, the crowd on the streets waiting for him, a member of the security services on the roof of the hotel opposite the artist's balcony, and the artist herself masturbating on the balcony of her house. The figure of a woman on a balcony, at the edge between the realm of the private and the public (from which women are often excluded) is a habitual trope in modernist painting. Here it is transformed into a porous membrane between ideology and sexuality, questioning the nature of socialist public space. Similarly, the manipulated photograph New Zagreb (People Behind Windows)

(also 1979) shows President Tito's car during his official visit with a modernist building with hand-coloured windows in the background. People were hiding behind those windows, as, for security reasons, they were forbidden from standing by them.

Ivekovic's simple highlighting gesture exposes how ideas of progress and freedom are set in stark contrast to the dissemination of power at several micro-levels. During the 1990s the point of critique in Ivekovic's work moved to direct media circulation. GEN XX is a work initially published in 1998 in the Croatian magazines Arkzin, Kruh i ruze and Zaposlena, all of them originating from the independent, alternative scene that in the 1990s set out to critique nationalistic politics and culture. The work consists of textual interventions on advertising photographs featuring famous fashion models. An image that is recognised as an advertisement by the average media consumer is supplemented by a text that introduces the model with the name of a People's Heroine from the anti-fascist struggle of World War II, along with her age at the date of her death. The story of People's Heroines and Heroes had ceased to be an inspiration for the younger generation of socialist youth in the late 1980s (if not even earlier ones), although the socialist state of Yugoslavia, up to its very end, didn't stop diligently commemorating its own foundation - as a result of national uprisings against the occupation, which, under the leadership of the Communist Party, developed into a revolution which overthrew the bourgeois regime. The system tirelessly and publicly proclaimed the continuity of the socialist revolution, but the cynicism of everyday life linked the names of People's Heroes to institutions, factories and brand names rather than to ideals such as social justice and equality for which people were willing to sacrifice their lives. But during the 1990s, with Croatian society contaminated by nationalistic ideology, war, the triumph of capitalism and the rediscovery of market economy, the struggle against what was denounced as the Left's cultural hegemony, now understood as a foreign element that threatened the purity of national identity, officially accepted the Left's anti-fascist heritage, but in practice denied it by supporting an amnesia about the whole socialist era. In such a situation, presenting People's Heroines as advertisement models in the media is not only a cynical commentary on an ideology that promotes one thing and does another, but a gesture that endorses human and social values denied by the system. Ivekovic knows how visibility functions within the dramatising of politics, and how the production of an audience is a key feature of contemporary politics. And, by using techniques employed in the symbolic construction of media readership, she transforms the political effects of the resulting audiences. The work not only advertises the values the People's Heroines stood for -social justice and equality - but also distributes the image of women who participate on equal terms in public affairs and politics, in contrast to the dominant attitude in 1990s Croatia, where family values and motherhood were stressed as the only proper areas for women.

A similar strategy was employed by the artist for her media interventions within the Women's HouseZarez, among others, the artist used advertisements for sunglasses, alluding to the use of dark glasses to hide bruises. By taking advantage of the fact that the media produces its audience in the name of pleasure and voluntary entertainment during leisure time (and not in the name of politics or pedagogy), Ivekovic subverts this and invests in the capacity of images to dramatise and, through that dramatisation, teach. Nada Dimic File (2000-01) is a series of works dealing with social amnesia, focusing on broader social processes that are primarily determined by the economy. With the transition process from communism to liberal economy, the state lost its status as the representative and guarantor of a system based on a notion of solidarity between workers. Within that new context, the state has the role of regulating the conflicts that result from the (unsolvable) contradictions of the system, adopting repressive strategies whenever it is not possible to channel the conflicts through parliamentary procedures or simple negotiation. Sociability is no longer based on solidarity, but on the management of conflicts. Nada Dimic File refers to the People's Heroine Nada Dimic, a real person killed in World War II for her anti-fascist activities, and also to the factory named after her, a remarkable example of late 19th-century industrial architecture and a production site for the textile industry, a sector that traditionally employs women. The factory, which throughout socialist times had successfully functioned under the heroine's name, went into bankruptcy as Endi International, the new name it was given in the 1990s. The urban intervention SOS Nada Dimic was made at a time when bankruptcy cases filled up news bulletins, and state regulations of bankruptcy procedures often controlled the fates of hundreds of pauperised, middle-aged women who were about to lose their jobs. The artist renovated and re-lighted the neon sign 'Nada Dimic' on the factory's façade as a political act of personal signature, certifying the symbolic connection between the factory's name and the real person, Nada Dimic.

project (1998-2003), which developed through a series of workshops with women from shelters for victims of domestic abuse. Ivekovic produced plaster casts of the women's faces and published their individual stories in different formats (postcards, posters, advertisemenst in magazines, etc.). For example, in a series of images published in Zagreb's cultural magazine

*

In contrast to clichés of a feminist art grounded on a biology of difference and a phantasmatic women's sensibility, Sanja Ivekovic is a feminist artist who focuses on the social construction of gender inseparable from questions of general human (class) emancipation. When she deals with intimacy, it is always mediated - not only literally by addressing media exploitations of emotions (women magazines, advertisements, world of glamour and stars, etc.), but also displaced onto others (for example, the intimacy of her mother's diary in Searching for My Mother's Number from 2002, or the stories of abused women in Women's House). This mediated displacement is also present in the pervading lack of individual expression in her work, and in the anonymity implied by the use of found material, collage and simple editing. Her work is never about the expression of individual emotions or about the obscenity of intimacy, but about gender relations as conditioned through social, class and political positions.

In her public-art project Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001), a replica of Luxembourg's monument Gëlle Fra (Golden Lady) - a symbol of the country's independence and resistance erected in the 1920s in commemoration of the victims of World War I - the artist made the female figure standing on top of the obelisk heavily pregnant. The original figure, draped in clothes that make the outlines of her body clearly visible, belongs to a corpus of monuments developed in a period in which the French Revolution had become the source for political iconography. The imagery it proposed was based on femininity as an allegory for freedom, republic, the nation and those disciplines that enable a nation's self-perception, the arts and sciences. The pregnant replica, placed at eye's sight from the original monument, differs also in the inscription at its base: the original one, which dedicates the monument to the memory of those who gave their life for the country, is replaced by text in French ('la résistance, la justice, la liberté, l'indépendance'), German ('Kitsch, Kultur, Kapital, Kunst') and English ('whore, bitch, Madonna, virgin'). The Golden Lady is renamed 'Rosa Luxembourg', and thus transferred from an abstract, allegorical context into concrete historical circumstances. The text at the monument's feet alludes to the linguistic complexities at the heart of Luxembourg's national identity, but also to the modern entanglement of a natural phenomenon (the existence of two sexes) and the construction of the modern nation-state. The transitions between cultural and political representations are fluid, and the political is always already determined by things which it is supposed to have nothing to do with. Ivekovic's sculpture clearly exposes the problematic natural character of the national monument. The monument provoked rather violent reactions in local media. The name 'Rosa Luxembourg' unmasks the fact that women are constructed as the symbolic bearers of national history, but at the same time it points out that they are denied any historical agency. Rosa Luxemburg, a 'terrorist from the left' - as she was identified in one of the angry letters published by Luxembourg's daily newspapers - disturbs the myths that sustain the capitalist system of production, as well as capitalism's supposed ability to reproduce itself without exploitation. Like the pregnant woman, she threatens to alter a collective memory that consists of things which are always already understandable and reproducible, things that don't need to be made explicit or explained. Rosa Luxemburg's words 'Today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all' are not supposed to be heard in today's Luxembourg, the embodiment of smooth financial and political order, just as they were not supposed to be heard in Europe in 1919. Judging by the public reactions, the erection of a public monument is as serious an act today as it was when the original was placed: the act by which the nation and its highest values are represented by a pregnant revolutionary woman, an act performed by an artist who is also an Other - woman, artist, feminist and from 'the Balkans', a region with a frail democratic tradition which embodies all that is wrong with the idea of a European community itself - an act that seriously challenges aseptic (multi-)cultural consensus at the heart of Europe.

- Nataša Ilić & Dejan Kršić