Feminism, Activism and Historicisation. Sanja Ivekovic and Antonia Majaca in conversation (n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal,2008)

Feminism, Activism and Historicisation

Sanja Ivekovic talks to Antonia Majaca

Antonia Majaca: We have been witnessing a revived interest in the conceptual art of the

1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe, with collectors, independent curators, and

institutions showing a particular interest in the early feminist practices of women artists

from this region. Are Eastern European feminist conceptual practices “returning” to the

Western map as just another commodified art practice within late capitalism or is the

introduction of an Eastern European artist here and there into major overview

exhibitions simply a way of fulfilling a quota of political correctness? Will such an

approach contribute to the absorption of Eastern European practices and narratives of

art history into the “big narrative of twentieth century Western art history”? Where, in

your opinion, is this impulse coming from? What is the role played by “nostalgia” in this

and how has this retroactive “historicisation” influenced a general perception of early

feminist practices?

Sanja Ivekovic: I have mixed feelings about the historicisation of feminist art and I agree with

Linda Nochlin that it is difficult (I would say almost impossible) to transform a life

experience of feminism and feminist art practice into a historical text. Nochlin compares this

very graphically to displaying a butterfly in a glass case. I‟m sceptical because I think that big

museum exhibitions mostly play the role of “domesticating” and “pacifying” the critical

potential of feminist art practice with the purpose of positioning it on the global art market.

This is, of course, followed by a tendency to idealise the past, so that, in spite of it consisting

of numerous and often contradictory forms (this is especially true of the American scene),

early feminist art is portrayed as a homogeneous body of work.

It is really problematic that the organisers of these exhibitions are even today, after almost

four decades, not inclined to revise the history of the practices of Eastern Europe more

thoroughly, meaning that proper analyses of women‟s art practices there (those that were

written or could have been written by its real participants) are still unavailable in mainstream

book lists. For me, as a person from this region, this is a particularly painful question and

when I find myself among the exceptionally small number of women artists from the region

represented in these forums, I feel discomfort, disappointment, and anger at the same time.

For if we take as an example the biggest exhibition of this profile so far, Wack! Art and the

Feminist Revolution (which I was invited to participate in), it is a legitimate question whether

this big event was made with the single purpose of reinforcing the idea of the domination of

American feminist practice on the international scene. However, there are other examples. I

also participated in the Spanish exhibition Gender Battle, in which the curator showed that the

feminist movement resulted in brilliant works in milieus which are still on the “margins” of

the global art market, in the countries of South America, for example. I‟m very glad that

Bojana Pejić has been invited to realise an international exhibition on this subject at the

MUMOK museum in Vienna in 2009, because I‟m sure that her “insider” perspective will be

an important intervention into the present master narrative.

Antonia Majaca: Conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s from ex-socialist European

countries is often, in discourse and in different models of presentation, attributed a

certain dissident or “activist” orientation. Taking into account that the beginnings of

your dealing with the borders between public and private through a prism of feminism

can be situated in this period, I‟m interested in how you, as a participant of these

“goings-on”, see conceptual art in the region in this sense. To what extent was or could

art be critical towards the totalitarian political system? How much visibility did

contemporary art have in the public sphere? It seems to me that the field of visual art

has always had more autonomy and freedom, but also a smaller range and a smaller

audience, making it less “dangerous” (as opposed to, for example, film, especially the so-

called “black wave”, which was regarded as “dangerous” and was radically censored)?

Sanja Ivekovic: We have to clear up what we mean by “region” and by “activist”. Our

Yugoslavian experience was, as you know, different from that of other countries in the former

Eastern Bloc or the situation in the USSR. New art practice, as critics called the art that was

made in the 1970s in Yugoslavia, was mostly exhibited in galleries that were part of student

cultural centres, but it was occasionally also seen in certain state galleries which presented the

local and international avant-garde scene and which had great prestige (for example, the

Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb). So although this practice was marginalised (“student

cultural centres” were where “alternative activity” was practiced), it cannot be defined as

dissident, because it was supported (and financed) by art institutions and a certain number of

“progressive” critics and intellectuals, some of whom were still influential members of the

Communist Party and had strong political positions in art institutions and government bodies.

Nor did the artists position themselves as dissidents. Their critique wasn‟t a “struggle against

dark communist totalitarianism”. They were more inclined to see their practice as the critique

of a bureaucratic government which wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs. So one can

rightfully say that those who were active on the counter-cultural scene at the time took the

socialist project far more seriously than the cynical governing political elite. Young cultural

workers who wrote for the socialist youth press demanded “permanent revolution” and

conceptual artists asked, in some of their manifestoes, for an adequate “revolutionary art for a

revolutionary society”. “New art practice” (which I also participated in) was really “new”, in

that it posed for the first time radical questions about the nature and function of art itself,

about the “autonomy” of the gallery-museum context, about the influence of market logic on

the production of the art work, etc. It‟s true that all of this was on Western artists‟ agendas,

but it seemed to us that the idea of the dematerialisation of the artwork and generally of an art

which leaves the institutions and communicates with “the people” was much closer to a

socialist idea of society. The paradox is that we as artists had serious intentions of

“democratising art” but the artistic language that we were using was so radically new that our

audience was really limited. Film was, of course, always more dangerous for the regime

because it had a mass audience. The fierce critique of society that the Yugoslavian “black

wave” directors articulated as early as the 1960s certainly left a deep trace on our generation,

but at the time when we started working many of them (Pavlović, Makavejev) had already

been “removed” from the scene. What was characteristic of conceptual art in the 1970s in

socialist Yugoslavia was that its critique referred exclusively to the “art system”. This

“institutional critique” played an extremely important role in destroying the modernist

paradigm which was strongly characteristic of official state art, but the question is whether we

can equate it with the activist art practice which appeared in the West as part of the civil rights

movement of the 1960s. The roots of the civil rights movement were only more visible here in

the 1980s, in the “decadent” phase of socialism, but in visual art, issues such as women‟s

rights, sexism, homophobia, poverty, chauvinism, nationalism, privatisation, etc. appeared

only later, in the 1990s, in democracy, when new channels for the production and distribution

of critical practice opened up and when the postmodernist paradigm became acceptable to the

cultural elite as well.

What I want to emphasize here is that we have to differentiate between activist and political

art. The difference isn‟t in the content, in the subject that the work deals with, but in the

methodology, the formal strategy, and the activist goal.

Antonia Majaca: Would you describe the Women’s House project from the 1990s as a

realisation of this? For this project you chose to work collaboratively with abused

women from different countries/cultures, empowering them and simultaneously

avoiding any direct representation, while demonstrating that violence is not confined to

any race, creed or class. What the viewer is confronted with in this project are the

disembodied plaster casts of women‟s faces, whose facial features are blurred in the

process. This brings to mind Mary Kelly‟s statement that „to use the body of woman, her

image or person, is not impossible, but it‟s problematic for feminism‟. In other segments

of the project (like the postcards), you also used only textual „representation‟, for

example female names. For version of the project realized in Zagreb in 2002, you

collaborated with non-government women‟s organizations and went even further in the

process of „dis-imaging‟ by entering the media again, but also the urban public space. It

seems to me that you made a radical shift here in so far as you literally „moved‟ domestic

and private traumas into the main square of the capital city of a country at the time

when the government was withdrawing financial support for a shelter for abused

women.

Sanja Ivekovic: Yes, in the Women’s House project I co-operated with the Autonomous

Women‟s House, which at the time was the only shelter for women victims of domestic

violence in Croatia (and was the first shelter for abused women in Eastern Europe!) but it was

struggling to continue with its work because the new “democratic” government still didn‟t

consider the question of violence against women to be “of state interest”.

The project started in 1998 and was actually commissioned by Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg. I

conceived it as an international collaboration project, a “work in progress”, which was going

to be produced as site specific installations, printed materials (texts, postcards, posters), and

press conferences when possible, but at the time I didn't know whether I would be able to

continue it, since my means of production were quite limited. What I did know was that I

didn't want to show in Luxembourg a project dealing with the violence against women that

happened in a small Balkan state, namely Croatia only, but I wanted to show that violence

also exists behind the bourgeois facade of Luxembourg liberal democracy. Therefore, at

Manifesta the project developed as a collaboration with Fraenhaus, the shelter in Luxembourg

and with the Autonomous Women House in Zagreb.

From 1998-2002, I also collaborated with The Bangkok Emergency Home in Bangkok and

the Safe House in Peja, Kosovo. I also did a special project with a shelter in Ljubljana. In

2003 I was invited by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb to install a show and to

publish a book that would cover all these collaborations. At the time The Autonomous

Womens‟ House was again facing the threat of being closed because of the lack of financial

means for everyday work. So we conceived the Zagreb project as a part of the campaign and

as a collaboration between the Autonomous Women's House, B.a.B.e. - the Women's Human

Rights Group, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and myself. The campaign started

on November 25, which is the International day against the violence against women, and

continued during the 14 days of activism. On this occasion I decided not to show the

installation in the gallery, but to do it only as a public project. The idea was to use the city's

central square, Trg Bana Jelacica, which is one of the busiest spaces in the city, so that the

visibility of the intervention would be as high as possible and this would therefore guarantee

the attention of a large public. Basically, the concept consisted of applying the floor plan of

the Autonomous Women's House in 1:1 scale to the surface of the pavement, while the stores,

coffee shops, banks, and other locations around the square were used as exhibition sites. An

important part of the project were interventions in the local daily papers and in some

magazines, in the form of a series of full-page images that resemble advertising images, but

are actually subverting them. For the visual part of these disturbing “ads” I used real

advertisements for sunglasses by well-known fashion companies, while the textual part

consisted of a woman's name and the story of a victim of abuse.

In Belgrade (October 2008), I also did a collaboration with the local shelter as a part of my

participation at the international exhibition 49 Belgrade October Salon. This shelter will close

it ‟s door in December due to the lack of financial support and I have no words to express my

anger and the sense of powerlessness about this…

Antonia Majaca: In the 1970s, how were your works read and interpreted, were they

interpreted as feminist and socially critical at all?

Sanja Ivekovic: The proponents of the New art practice in socialist Yugoslavia were mostly

male artists, in the 1970s only a few women artists were visible on the scene. I was

preoccupied from the start with the question of gender identity and gender roles in society, I

tried to reflect on my own position as a woman in a patriarchal culture, which was, in spite of

the officially egalitarian policy, always alive and present in socialism. A recurrent theme in

these early works was the politics of the representation of femininity in the mass media. I

publicly declared myself as a feminist artist and in this sense my position was really specific.

As there were no feminist artists or critics on the scene, local critics (male, of course)

understood my work as (only) an auto-referential attitude, an analysis of the “institution of the

artist”, which was a popular subject for conceptual artists. The critical apparatus for a

different reading of these works simply didn‟t exist. I have to mention that as early as 1978,

the first international feminist gathering (first in a socialist country!) was organised at the

Belgrade cultural centre by women from Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade, under the title

COMRADE-SSE WOMAN: The Women Issue?1 and it was a turning point for feminism and

1 See Chiara Bonfiglioli‟s „Belgrade 1978: Remembering the Conference „Drugarica Zena.

Zensko Pitanje: Novi Pristup?: Comrade Women. The Woman Question. A New Approach?

for the history of civil society in Yugoslavia. The Women‟s Section of the Sociological

Society of the University of Zagreb, “Woman and Society”, was formed in Zagreb at the time

and started to systematically engage in feminist theory. Although I was a personal friend of

the members of the Section and attended their lectures, the subject of their research didn‟t

include visual art. The language of visual art simply wasn‟t recognised as a relevant discourse

yet, so no feminist reflection of my work came from these first feminists of ours, either.

Antonia Majaca: Your much-anthologised work Triangle (1979) is in some of the most

significant collections in the world. This work provoked the most explicit reaction of the

authorities, or rather, without the reaction of the authorities the work itself wouldn't

exist. In the performance, did you count on censorship occurring and did you expect the

active "participation" of its perpetrators, the state‟s "organs of law-enforcement" (the

police) to intervene? What was the relation between censorship and artist‟s auto-

censorship in socialist Yugoslavia at the time when Triangle was made and in your own

artistic practice? What forms of censorship are there today in Croatia as a neo-liberal

democracy?

Sanja Ivekovic: It's right to say that Triangle really wouldn't exist if those two "organs of law-

enforcement" hadn't decided to execute their given roles and stop my performance. I'm

grateful to them for that! Even though they were "comrades" who surely were not acquainted

with the idea of "the audience participating in the creation of the art work". I must honestly

say that I thought of this work as the continuation of a series of performances that I had done

at the time in Yugoslavia, as well as in Canada, Italy, and Germany, where the audience was a

constitutive element of the work. It's true that these performances happened in art centres and

Thirty Years On‟ MA thesis, University of Utrecht, August 2008. http://igitur-

archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2008-1031-202100/UUindex.html

galleries, whereas in Triangle I was aware that I was doing this in a completely different,

"non-artistic" context (my balcony at home while a parade to Tito happened on the streets

below) and that my showing the (women's) right to pleasure was very likely to provoke the

reaction of the authorities at that moment, because it would be understood as a direct

provocation. Today one would call it civil disobedience. But I still think that in this case there

can be no standard talk of censorship because, if this was censorship, then what would we

have to call the fact that I wasn't allowed to be on that same balcony (which was closed up

and furnished with windows in the meantime) last year, when G. W. Bush was passing

through my street during his visit to Zagreb! Would we (in this case, at least) say that it's

simply a matter of controlling public space with the purpose of protecting a political figure or

is it really that the authorities‟ control is even stronger and more present in neoliberal

democracy than in socialism? The institution of censorship is more sophisticated today, but

it's still present, of course.

In 1998, the Croatian national TV station "modified" my promotional videos, produced as part

of a campaign to stop violence against women, in which I used some national symbols. In

2001 for "Miss Croatia and Miss Brazil read Žižek and Chomsky", which I was preparing as

the Croatian representative for the São Paolo Biennial, the "censor" who refused my project

never revealed himself, but it is very likely that it was the curator who was responsible having

received "instructions" from the national ministry of culture. Still, for me, the greatest shock

came when the organisers of the Liverpool Biennial in 2004 refused to include a couple of

questions which I had chosen for the project, one of them being "Should we pull out of Iraq?"

Namely, the media sponsor of the Biennial (the local newspapers) simply said that they

wouldn't print them! That's what I would call censorship. Sponsors are, as we know, the most

efficient censors today, but their role is often hard to detect. The question of auto-censorship

on the other hand, seems to me to be much more complex. It's understandable that artists in

former communist regimes were very careful in the choice of subjects for their works,

because the borders between what was permitted and what was forbidden were relatively

clearly defined. With the appearance of democracy, this black and white picture became a bit

more colourful, but the question of civil courage has remained the same. At the time when the

nationalist discourse of the right-wing government became omnipresent in Croatia in 1990,

again most artists weren't willing to oppose a politics of this kind and an extremely small

numbers of artists were engaged in the anti-war campaign before and during the war in former

Yugoslavia.

Antonia Majaca: Your socially critical practice became politically even more direct

precisely in this period, in a transformed economic-political environment. In one of your

projects from the transition period of the 1990s, GEN XX, you juxtapose the

omnipresent advertisement images of the new consumerist environment with the

repressed and deliberately politically manipulated and demonised narratives of partisan

anti-fascist history… You use the tactics of inserting a "virus" into public space, which

was defined at the time by a state of collective amnesia on one hand and raging

nationalism on the other. In this work, you apply onto images of famous fashion models

advertising luxury consumer goods in the new, “wild” post-socialist capitalism, names

and information about the deaths of antifascist heroines in World War II (emancipated,

self-assured women – political subjects). Many young women today (also the target

group of these advertisements) weren't acquainted with these women or their destinies,

but this is the generation which is being led, by a new consumerist environment, towards

complete political passivity. It seems that you found a new model of defamiliarisation

(ostranenie) precisely through this flexible navigation of signs in a world characterised

by the hyperproduction of images. Is it a matter of necessity for you to expose that

which is generally repressed in a neutralised, normalised public sphere or are you

directly reacting to a particular state of urgency?

Sanja Ivekovic: My motive for making GEN XX was a wish to articulate my own act of

resistance at a moment when our society was infected with nationalist ideology and the fight

against so-called left cultural hegemony. The whole antifascist heritage became subject to a

silent collective amnesia and all members of the antifascist resistance movement were simply

erased from public memory. Many of them were well-known to my generation, especially

those women and men who were declared People's Heroes in Titoist Yugoslavia, but the

generation which grew up in the 1990s (including my daughter) didn't learn anything about

them in school, because they had disappeared from all of their schoolbooks. Although I had

done media "interventions" before and used media images in my collages, in the moment

when I conceived this series, a magazine advertisement asserted itself as the most adequate

medium. I didn't want to exhibit in state art institutions at the time, because they were totally

"contaminated" by nationalist ideology and I wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible.

My intention was to distribute GEN XX through the commercial press and not only alternative

magazines. Unfortunately, Croatian commercial women's magazines didn't agree to print a

single work (censorship again perhaps?), so the whole series came out in alternative

magazines, which were, at the time, the only place open to Croatian and foreign theoreticians

and activists fostering a critical discourse. But although its circulation was limited, GEN XX

quickly became popular, especially among young people. As far as the strategy is concerned,

here you can rightfully call it "defamiliarisation" (I still find Shklovsky interesting) but I also

like to call it an "appropriation of authority". Because the institution of the advertisement still

undeniably has authority in today's media space and fashion models still function as role-

models for a huge audience of women consumers.

My works are formally very diverse, because I always try to work out the most efficient way

of getting the message across in a given context. I think that the state of urgency, which is a

characteristic of the time we live in, demands that artists be extremely flexible; precisely

strategies of intervention (as opposed to an individual style, to the auratic, the idea of the artist

as genius) are the feminist heritage which is exceptionally relevant for today's art practice. I

also made use of the tactics of "inserting a virus" in an action at a more traditional art event,

the Zagreb Salon in 1998, where I scattered crumpled-up pieces of red paper all over the

exhibition space, which were actually printed pages of a report on the status of women's rights

in Croatia, written for the UN by a coalition of women's non-government organisations

(which evidently differed significantly from the official report). The red paper balls occupied

in a humorous way the territory intended for a serious museum presentation, representing a

factor of disturbance to the aesthetic unity of the exhibition and, on the other hand, their

content (feminist propaganda!) was the greatest challenge in the context of an elitist art event.

I made another version of this work under the title Night Shift at Ruth Noack and Roger M.

Beurgel's exhibition Die Regierung at the Vienna Secession in 2005.

Antonia Majaca: At the Documenta 12 you made an intervention in public space titled

Mohnfeld / Poppy Field. On the lawn in front of the Fridericianum, the central exhibition

building, with the help of experts you planted a poppy field consisting of two plant

species – the red, field poppy and the purple, opium poppy. You turned the

Friedrichplatz (which has had different roles both in the history of the art event and the

history of the city) into a field of wildflowers, visually strong and with great symbolic

potential… Why did you pick this particular plant and which of its many connotations

did you wish to invoke?

Sanja Ivekovic: When I was invited to Documenta 12, I immediately wanted to make a work

in front of the Fridericianum, on the Friedrichplatz, about the history of which I had already

learned a bit. In the eighteenth century it was the largest square in Germany and in Nazi times

drills, military demonstrations, and parades were organised there. Of course, to us foreigners

it is known only as the exhibition space of the Documenta, where great (male?) artists have

left their permanent mark. At the previous Documenta, I participated with a project

(Searching for My Mother's Number) which had as its starting point the life of my mother,

who was a partisan fighter and Auschwitz prisoner, so it seemed interesting to me now to

"intervene" into this space, which has a particular history, known, I supposed, to the residents

of Kassel. The poppy flower is immensely rich in meanings, but its interpretation is different

in the West and in the East. In English-speaking areas, the red poppy has become accepted as

a symbol of soldiers killed in the war, while in the East it is a symbol of resistance and

revolution. Having grown up in socialist Yugoslavia, the song „Red Poppies‟, a very popular

partisan song, was very well known to me. Like many other references to the socialist past, it

disappeared from public memory with the inauguration of neoliberal democracy. When the

young members of a women's choir in Zagreb introduced it into their repertoire a few years

ago that was their own act of resistance to the ideology of Croatian “wild” capitalism.

On the other hand, we directly link the image of the purple (or white) opium poppy with the

problematic cultivation of this plant in Afghanistan, where 92% of the world's heroin supply

is produced today. It is known that after declaring a "war on terror", which destroyed the

Taliban regime, the Bush administration also declared a "war on drugs", but this "war" was

reduced to attacking poor Afghan farmers for whom poppy cultivation was the only source of

income, while the big narco-bosses were always spared, as expected.

The poppy is a unique plant which has this twofold nature, two characteristics which are so

opposed, the visible one consisting of an exceptionally beautiful flower and then the invisible

one, its product, which is potentially lethal - aesthetics+politics! I could almost say that the

poppy represents a fine metaphor for what I'm trying to do…

Another element of the installation was the audio recording of nine revolutionary songs sung

by choirs of the women's activist groups including LeZbor from Zagreb and RAWA from

Afghanistan, played two times daily through large loudspeakers in the public space of the

square.

Antonia Majaca: One of the constant elements of your work is your collaboration with

activist groups and civil society initiatives. To what extent is this approach based on the

idea of empowerment and to what extent on giving visibility to problems which have

been absorbed by media manipulation and image production, as in the case of

hegemonic American politics in the Middle East, for example?

Sanja Ivekovic: One month before the opening of the Documenta, I participated in the

exhibition Memorial to the Iraq War at the London Institute of Contemporary Art. For this

exhibition (which presented artistic concepts for a monument) I drew up a proposal for the

project White Poppy Field Guarded by Women in Black. I proposed planting a field of white

poppies on a surface of about 200 m2 in a public urban space, which would be "guarded" by

members of the British branch of the organisation "Women in Black". The action of

"guarding" would take place continually, 24 hours a day, during the harvest season of the

opium poppy and during the rest of the year the members of the organisation would organise

it according to their possibilities, while the maintenance of the field would be entrusted to the

British organisation White Poppy, which promotes education for peace and alternative ways

of conflict resolution. Here, as in the Documenta project, I wanted to continue my

collaboration with activist organisations, because I think that this is one of the possible new,

efficient models of production which expand the borders of the narrow art world.

It's not only a matter of empowerment, but also of the wish to realise a fertile dialogue

between activities which are still far apart – art and activism. I try to be critical towards my

own role, so I refrain from giving my interpretation of issues which I don't know enough

about, preferring instead to leave their presentation to those (activists) who are immersed in

them, but I am also ready to fight for a visual language of my own, the one which I consider

best to give shape to the project, in order to establish communication with the public and in

doing so contribute to better visibility of a common goal.

Antonia Majaca: During the Documenta, Friedrichplatz became a red square, uniting

the different symbolic connotations which you speak of, but also a popular location for

visitors of the exhibition and the residents of the city of Kassel. Many of your projects

penetrate directly into the public space and more generally into the public sphere, that

is, into what Rosalyn Deutsche, for example, called „the realm of discursive interaction

about political issues‟. Public art, in her account, could therefore be defined as art

operating in or as a public sphere in which making art public becomes virtually

synonymous with a demand for art‟s politicization. Does the Poppy Field project, from

your perspective, operate in and as the public sphere? Moreover, in a dichotomy of

audience and public (passive/active), how do you see the relation towards the public?

Sanja Ivekovic: It seems that in the field of contemporary art the viewer is often reduced to an

observer, a passive consumer, instead of being encouraged to be a subject, who is invited to

“speak” and act. I have mentioned that in my early works I already devoted special attention

to the participation of the audience in the development of the work, but today‟s cultural and

political constellations call for new modes of operation. When I conceived the project Poppy

Field, it was clear to me that it was a long process - because even today not all factors in

poppy cultivation can be completely controlled - and that the citizens of Kassel would

actually be able to witness this process of the growth, development, and decaying of the field.

Although I am, of course, not underestimating the typical art audience of the Documenta (who

obviously enjoyed “appropriating” the work with their cameras), I was happy that the citizens

of Kassel accepted the project very well and were even “empowered” to create a group

initiative which contacted me, asking me to donate the work, in order to keep the field and

make it a truly public city space which belongs to the citizens. At that point, it turned out that

the status of Friedrichplatz as a city square was actually questionable, since every five years it

“belongs” to the Documenta, so that the future of the field was resolved then, as well. This is

how a hidden power relation of obvious inequality between the citizens and the (art)

institution emerged. Poppy field did provoke a contestation in the public sphere, and thus, as

an art project, I believe it created a political space, a space of debate, and a space where the

public, in a way, transforms into subjects.

Antonia Majaca: The question of the commodification and spectacularisation of culture,

although it‟s been present in the West since the 1980s, is becoming more and more

present globally in the context of large-scale contemporary art events. How is it possible

today, from your perspective as an artist who is often invited to art events such as the

Documenta, to avoid art becoming a carnival or a spectacle when the politics of an

oppositional discourse in art, contemporary thought, and the social and political areas in

general is absorbed all too often at the very moment when it appears in these events?

Was Poppy Field consciously playing on this, responding to spectacle with spectacle,

using the spectacle of Documenta in order to produce precisely this contestation in

public space?

Sanja Ivekovic: Documenta is undoubtedly a spectacular event, so the idea of a poppy field,

which is also a spectacular image, seemed completely appropriate to me. The working title of

my project was Opium for the Masses, which can also be read as a metaphor of this situation.

But the fact that 700.000 people come to see the Documenta makes it a good launching pad, a

platform where ideas and information indicating an alternative to the trend of the

spectacularisation of culture can achieve recognition. That‟s why it was important to me that

the internet addresses of the organisations that I collaborated with were emphasized on the

label of the work, so that visitors had the possibility of establishing direct contact with the

activists. I was sorry that I was not able to exhibit at the Documenta all the materials that I

collected in the course of my research, which speak very directly about the issues that Poppy

Field potentially opened up, such as the American politics of exploitation in Afghanistan, the

everyday practice of trading women to pay back opium debts, or the burning issue of the

legalisation of Afghan poppy production. Fortunately, I had the opportunity of showing this

whole documentation later in Zagreb, at the exhibition Poppy Fields - from the research

archive. Finally, I hope that all this material, along with documentation of the work, will be

brought together in book form, so that the project can live on.

This interview was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemsiza Art Contemporary and first

published in The Collection Book. Edited by Thyssen-Bornemsiza Art Contemporary, 2008.

It has been extended by Antonia Majaca and Sanja Ivekovic and re-edited for n.paradoxa.

SANJA IVEKOVIC. GENERAL ALERT. WORKS 1974-2007 was shown at Fundació Antoni Tàpies

31 May - 22 July 2007 Curators: Natasa Ilic and Kathrin Rhomberg Organised by Fundació

Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Göteborgs Konsthall, Göteborg; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln; and

Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck.

A new publication on her work is:-

Nuria Enguita (ed.) Sanja Ivekovic: Works 1970-2007 Spain: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 2008.