Sanja Ivekovic born in Zagreb, 1949

Also at MOMA, i had the chance to see the first North American exhibition of Sanja Ivekovic's work. She is a contemporary video artist. One of my favourite pieces, called Sweet Violence, the work that gives this exhibition its title, was among Sanja Iveković’s first forays into video. It presents one of the artist's recurring themes: the corrosive effect of media culture under the state doctrine known as the Third Way, a political experiment that took place in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, defined by an idiosyncratic mix of socialism and free-market economics, all steeped in propaganda. In order to create a distancing effect, and thus make obvious the contrivances and fictive qualities of media reality, Iveković superimposed black bars on a television monitor and then taped one of the daily broadcasts of Zagreb’s Ekonomsko Propagandni Program (economic propaganda program). With this simple intervention she visually disconnects viewers from the "sweet violence" of media seduction so that they may examine the power of images, the way they circulate in everyday life, the stories they purport to tell, and, by extension, the mythologies that lurk beneath their surfaces.

source: MOMA website