objectivecorrelative:

Sanja Iveković, Sweet Violence, 1974 (video still, via MoMA)

“Is it more surprising that Croatian artist Sanja Iveković has never had a major exhibition of her work in the United States until now, or that this overdue retrospective is taking place at MoMA? Iveković’s work is overtly political, incisively tackling issues of women’s rights, life under dictatorship, East-West relations, and the political struggles in the countries of the former Yugoslavian federation, both during and after Communism. Moreover, it defies easy categorization in terms of medium and style: though the exhibition,Sweet Violence, is presented under the aegis of MoMA’s Department of Photography, the work on display ranges from photo-based conceptual projects to collage, drawings, performance, video, and installation. Iveković has exhibited widely in Europe, and is considered a crucial figure in post-war Eastern and Central European art, yet she is little-known in the United States, an art historical blind-spot this retrospective aims to correct.”

I wrote about Sanja Iveković’s MoMA retrospective for Idiom.

Something I didn’t talk about in the review, but have found consistently interesting (perhaps more accurately: annoying) in the way the show has been discussed are the comparisons drawn between Iveković and the work of her American counterparts—Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, mostly. Such discussions are perhaps inevitable given that MoMA has a Cindy Sherman retrospective on view a few floors above, and the artists are roughly the same age, working with certain similar themes, but framing Iveković in these terms strikes me as being far more limiting than productive. Frankly, a more relevant conversation might center around the fact that it is unprecedented for MoMA to be presenting two major solo shows of female artists at the same time, particularly since both are coming from the same curatorial department. Which is to say: why these two shows, these two artists, at this particular time? And, moreover, why this particular department—is there something inherent about photography as a medium that lends itself to exceptional female artists, or is this a matter of curatorial decision-making? Never mind the fact that the discussion only ever goes one way: I’ve yet to see anything discussing Sherman in terms of Iveković. Instead, the implicit assumption is that Iveković is elevated by the comparison to Sherman, Kruger, and so on; that she is a “minor” artist who needs to be validated (even though, from the vantage of Eastern and Central Europe, Iveković is hugely influential—a decidedly “major” one.) 

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This is so goddamn spot on.