Sanja Ivekovic: Unknown Heroine, South London Gallery - review
After years as a cult conceptual and feminist artist, Sanja Ivekovic, born in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1949, is suddenly very hip. Following a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York she now has this exhibition, shared across two London venues.
Her Seventies work, made under the communist rule of Tito in Yugoslavia, is the most consistent. Like much of the impressive art made under Eastern Bloc regimes, Ivekovic’s work has a lo-fi, homespun feel, using photographs, collages, text and video.
Gender politics and media critique dominate the work. Double Life (1975) features adverts of glamorous women torn from magazines next to snapshots from Ivekovic’s private albums capturing the artist in related poses, emphasising the gap between reality and advertising fiction. In the video Make Up — Make Down (1978) she films herself applying make-up but focuses only on her hands and cleavage.
Other than a mock-magazine featuring sunglasses adverts alongside brutal stories of physically abused women, much of her more recent output lacks the concision and rigour of her early work. But this is a good, if patchy, show of an artist who deserves to be reconsidered.
Until February 24 (020 7703 6120, south londongallery.org; 020 7613 2141, calvert22.org)
