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SANJA IVEKOVIC: Poppy Fields/ from the research archive and documentation of the projects
At this year’s Documenta 12 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, Sanja Iveković realized an intervention in public space titled Mohnfeld / “Poppy Field”. On the lawn in front of the Fridericianum, the central building of the exhibition, the artist planted, with the help of experts, a poppy field made up of two species – the red, field poppy (Papaver Rhoeas) and the purple, opium poppy (Papaver Somniferum). A constituent part of the installation was an audio recording of 9 revolutionary songs sung by the Zagreb activist/lesbian choir Le Zbor and the choir of the women’s group RAWA from Afghanistan, which was played twice daily through large loudspeakers placed on the square. The Friedrichsplatz thus became, throughout the duration of the Documenta, a red square uniting various symbolic connotations, but also a favorite location for visitors of the exhibition and for the locals of Kassel. During the Documenta, visitors were also offered, via the internet site of the exhibition, to send their photographs to the artist.
In May this year, one month before the opening of the Documenta, Sanja Iveković participated in the exhibition Memorial to the Iraq War at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. For this exhibition, which presented artistic concepts of a memorial, with a focus on the Iraq war, Sanja Iveković conceived a proposal of the project White Poppy Field Guarded by Women in Black: the artist proposed the planting of white poppies on a surface of minimally 20 x 10 m in a public urban space, which would be “guarded” by members of the British branch of the “Women in Black” organization. The guarding would be continuous – 24 hours a day during the harvest season of the opium poppy and during the rest of the year the members of the organization would arrange the guarding according to their resources, while the field itself would be maintained by the British organization “White Poppy”, which promotes education for peace and non-violent conflict resolution.
The exhibition Poppy Fields – from the research archive and project documentation at the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery presents these two projects as complementary segments of the artist’s research and dealing with the subject. The exhibition will therefore include a collage – the proposal of the project White Poppy Field Guarded by Women in Black - which was exhibited at the ICA, a new video, “Poppy Field”, filmed during the Documenta, as well as a selection of photographs of the Kassel project. Among the other exhibits are materials gathered by the artist during the research process, photographs by visitors during the exhibition, and media coverage of the project.
In Anglo-Saxon countries the red poppy has become a symbol of remembrance of soldiers killed in the war, while in socialist countries it is accepted as a symbol of political struggle, resistance, and revolution. Planting opium poppy along with the field poppy on the Friedrichsplatz (which has played different roles in history, among others as a place for military ceremonies), Sanja Iveković refers to the problem of poppy cultivation for the purposes of drug production in Afghanistan. Today, six years after the establishment of a “democratic government” by the USA, Afghanistan is the country where 92% of the world’s opium supply is produced and also a place where women are often direct victims of the illegal drug trade.
As in many of her earlier works, for this project Sanja Iveković has collaborated with feminist and activist organizations – the Zagreb choir Le Zbor, whose partisan and revolutionary songs from the Second World War indicate the potential of resistance, as do the songs performed by the RAWA organization (The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan).
The focus of the exhibition is on the discursive and research segments of the project and on the presentation of a selection of materials which weren’t given room in a mastodontic exhibition, subject to the imperative of representativity, such as the Documenta. Primarily, the exhibition presents the artist’s research materials, uncovering the process of development and the background of the project. Equally important is the artist’s research on the multifarious symbolic potential of the poppy throughout history as well as in the present, and the link with the broader global issue of illegal drug production and trade which is the source of enormous profit, while neglecting the possibility of the legalization of poppy cultivation for medical purposes, which would improve the standards of living of poor Afghan farmers. The exhibited materials speak of the influence of illegal production and distribution (dictated by unbalanced economic and political positions in the time of an extreme neoliberal capitalist matrix) on the global state of human rights, questioning these relations but also implicitly linking them to mourning and/or to the real potential of revolution and resistance to the state of a global order (as an alliance between capitalism and liberal democracy) on the other. The documentation implies the brutality of the effect of power led by capital, a brutality masked and legitimated by the existence of an imaginary threat and by the persistence of a state of exception on one hand and on the other a merciless exploitation of the poor economic situation of the so-called third world countries. With subtle irony the project evokes the melancholy of the left, which mourns the revolutions of the past and still hasn’t realized that revolutionary thought doesn’t have to be based on the real, the experienced, the past, but on the as yet nonexistent, on that which is yet to occur. The poppies call for a reevaluation of revolutionary discourse through the use of a collectively known, semantically double-coded, iconography in the time of a general devaluation of ideas, simultaneously linking the need for global resistance with the tragedy and absurdity of war and of the victims of the Middle Eastern oil-driven conflicts.
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Sanja Iveković lives and works in Zagreb. In the 70’s she started exhibiting extensively, working in the media of photography, video, performance, and installation. Her work in the 90’s focuses on the collapse of socialist regimes, corruption in the transition period, and women’s rights. She exhibited at events such as Documenta 11 and 12, „General Alert“, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Gothenburg Konsthall (2007); Kölnischer Kunstverein, “Public Cuts”, Galerija P74 (Ljubljana, 2006); “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970”, Tate Modern (London, 2005); “Die Regierung”, Secession (2005); “Women’s House”, Palazzo Ferreri, (Genoa, 2004); “Personal Cuts”, NGBK (2002); Galerie im Taxispalais (Innsbruck, 2001); “After the Wall”, Moderna Muset (1999/2001); Manifesta 2 (Luxembourg, 1998).
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Type of programme: exhibition
Lasting time: 19.12.2007. - 25.01.2008.
