Sanja Ivekovic - 9781846380952

In Sanja Ivekovic's Triangle ( Trokut, 1979),four black-and-white photographs and written text capture an eighteen-minute performance from May10, 1979. On that date, a motorcade carrying Josip Broz Tito, then president of Yugoslavia, drovethrough the streets of downtown Zagreb. As the President's limousine passed beneath her apartment,Ivokevic began simulating masturbation on her balcony. Although she could not be seen from thestreet, she knew that the surveillance teams on the roofs of neighboring buildings would detect herpresence. Within minutes, a policeman appeared at her door ordered her inside. Not only didIvekovic's action expose government repression and call attention to the rights of women, it alsocalled attention to the relationship of gender to power, and to the particular experience ofpolitical dissidence under communist rule in Eastern Europe. Triangle isconsidered one of Ivekovic's key works and yet, despite Ivekovic's stature as one of the leadingartists of the former Yugoslavia, it has received little direct attention. With this book, RuthNoack offers the first sustained examination of Ivekovic's widely exhibited, now canonicalartwork.

After a detailed analysis of the work's formal qualities, Noack considersits position in the context of artistic production and political history in socialist Yugoslavia.She looks closely at the genesis of the performance and its documentation as a work of art, andrelates the making of the work and the politics of canon-making to issues pertaining to the formerEast-West divide. She discusses the artistic language and meaning-making in relation toconceptualism and performance and to the position of women in Tito's Yugoslavia and in society atlarge, and investigates the notion that Ivekovic's work of this period is participating incitizenship, shifting the focus from the artist's subversive act to her capacity to shape the termsthrough which we order our world.