Sanja Ivekovic

Double-Life, 1975-6

Extracts from Lotty Sanna's 2011 Dissertation-

Pretty Vacant: Narcissism and Feminist Activism in Sanja Iveković's work of the 1970s

Sanja Iveković (Zagreb, 1949) is a female artist whose career began in former Yugoslavia in the 1970s and whose oeuvre of work consists of collage, photography, video, drawings, public action and installation. Iveković’s most powerful works address the issue of the representation of women in the ‘public’ sphere and the way that this affects a woman’s behaviour in her ‘private’ life.

In 1975-76, as a reaction to the imagery promoted by mass media that had begun to invade the whole visual world of Iveković’s society, she created three series, A Double Life, 1975, Tragedy of a Venus, 1975, and A Sweet Life, 1975-6.

In Double Life Iveković creates sixty four juxtaposed image comparisons using advertisements containing a picture of a woman next to photographs of herself, taken from her private collection (1953-75), in which her look and pose resemble that of the other woman.

For Sweet Life, an image from a celebrity scandal magazine is compared to a private photograph of Iveković.

In Tragedy of a Venus an image of Iveković is compared to an image of Marilyn Monroe taken from a magazine published after her death. Each series flows into the next, lending themselves to being viewed as a whole series.

Viewed together they provide a visualisation of the artist’s progressive realisation of her lack of originality and agency, as her life mimics so closely the images that surround her.