English
A couple of years ago, at a performances festival which took place in Paris, the Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovi?, protagonist of the excellent anthological exhibition ´Sweet Violence´ which can be visited at the MOMA until the 26th of March (http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1148), presented a piece, ´Eva´s Game´, in which she recreated the extremely famous photograph of Julian Wasser taken in 1962 regarding the great anthological exhibition of Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum, which represented the influential and enigmatic French artist, who had allegedly retired decades ago from all artistic production, playing chess with his young friend and future artist and writer Eve Babitz, who facing the ever-smart looking Duchamp, appeared completely naked.
Sanja Ivekovi? deconstructed the famous image, a regular practice in her interesting work, recreating the game in a way that it was the woman, herself, who was dressed, in black like Duchamp, while her opponent, the commissioner of the Parisian festival, was completely naked.
At the same time that both recreated the game at Pasadena, they recited a dialogue made with the words of an interview given by Eve Babitz herself, whose answers were proffered by Sanja Ivekovi?, placing herself somewhat simultaneously in the place of the two protagonists of the scene, nearly forty years after the original photo.
The performance give us many guidelines on the way that Sanja Ivekovi? works with texts and images, as well as the feminist side of her work, always interested to tackle the problem of the role of women in society and in history inside the context of an incisive social and political critic which deals directly with the most controversial subjects of our time through deconstructive strategies which are highly subversive and suggestive.
Performances such as ´Practice Makes a Master´, which, made for the first time in 1982, will be re-interpreted again especially for the occasion through the body of the dancer Sonja Pregard, are paradigmatic in the way that Ivekovi? refers in her work to the forms of use and abuse of political power. In it -whose original video can be seen at the exhibition together with other pieces of video in a monochannel and audiovisual installations representative of her work such as ´Sweet Violence´ (1974), ´Personal Cuts´ (1982), ´General Alert (Soap Opera) (1995) and ´Rohrbach Living Memorial´ (2005), as well as 100 photomontages which include the acclaimed series ´Double Life´ (1975-76)- Ivekovi?, who wears a short black dress and a white bag on her head, suffers strange shakes which bring her to the floor, where she remains in different positions for various seconds before getting up again and again while a spotlight goes on and off intermittently and the voice of Marilyn, singing a song from the film ´Bus Stop´, gets slower and slower until it resembles that of a man.
The work of Sanja Ivekovi? has done nothing but gain importance with the passing of time. When you rent apartments in New york you won´t regret going to the MOMA and seeing first hand her extraordinary work.
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
