IVANA IVKOVIĆ

My work engages the deconstruction of gender roles and the tension between intimacy and ideology by positioning the male body as a site of vulnerability and resistance, exposing and disrupting inherited scripts of power and fragility. Informed by travel, migration, and shifting cultural contexts, I explore how identity and social norms are negotiated across spaces through drawing, installation, video, and delegated performance. By activating and inverting the gaze, I construct spatial constellations that intensify embodied presence, drawing viewers into a charged field where the body becomes a locus of affect, critique, and transformation.

Ivana Ivković

Ivana Ivković (b. in Belgrade, YU) is a visual and performance artist whose work merges performance, installation, and conceptual approaches. She holds a BFA in Painting, an MA in Drawing, and a PhD in Performance Art from the University of Arts in Belgrade (RS). Her practice centers on delegated performance, through which she examines gender, identity, power, and memory. Ivković explores the deconstruction of gender roles and the tension between intimacy and ideology by positioning the male body as a site of vulnerability, sensuality, and resistance. Merging intimacy and collectivity, her precisely staged situations challenge patriarchal and ocular-centric structures through embodied presence and spatial tension. Continuously questioning the exhibition format, she transforms it into an active, processual field of engagement that bridges fine art, theatre, and mass-media culture. She lives and works in Belgrade (RS)

She recently began the performance series MONUMENT OF TRUST, introduced with the prologue THE BASE OF TRUST (Belgrade, RS) and the first act PORT OF TRUST (Podgorica, ME). The project continues to evolve through collaborations with other institutions, expanding its exploration of vulnerability, power, corruption, and collective trust. Between 2021 and 2025, Ivković realized the performance series MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo, BA, 2021), the Humboldt Forum (Berlin, DE, 2022), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina (Novi Sad, RS, 2022), the Goethe-Institut Athen (Athens, GR, 2023), mala voadora (Porto, PT, 2023), and the Varna City Art Gallery (Varna, BG, 2024), alongside her solo exhibition AFTER YOU at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (RS, 2021). Earlier works include I ONLY WANT TO LOVE ME at Hošek Contemporary (Berlin, DE, 2019), IN HIM WE TRUST at the Bitef Theatre (Belgrade, RS, 2020), and LINES, ROWS, COLUMNS (DORMITORY) at the October Salon (Belgrade, RS, 2016).

Her latest project, the FACING series—developed with the Basel-based publishing house dsbooks in collaboration with the Cultural Center of Belgrade—comprises thirteen art and travel books, beginning with Facing Morocco (2023) and Facing California & Arizona (2024).

MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST – AFTERPIECE

MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST – AFTERPIECE took place in Berlin during the opening of the Humboldt Forum, as part of SauerPowerKlubnacht by the collective Slavs and Tatars. Performed in the Schlüterhof and conceived in dialogue with the site of the Humboldt Forum, the work unfolds against the charged backdrop of the institution’s opening—an event marked by public debates around Germany’s colonial legacy, restitution, and the politics of memory. Housed within the reconstructed Prussian palace, the Humboldt Forum embodies the tensions between historical representation, cultural identity, and the rewriting of collective narratives. Within this context, Ivković’s performance interrogates the relationship between body, memory, and history. By placing the vulnerable male body at the center of her work, Ivković continues her critical exploration of identity, power, and collective narratives.

The piece unfolds in the transitional “after-space” that arises when established orders collapse, opening a field of reflection on the present moment between past and future. The use of non-professional performers foregrounds authenticity and immediacy while dissolving conventional boundaries between representation and lived experience. In this way, the performance operates as both ritual and critical inquiry, positioning the body as a monument of fragility and possibility, and as a site for reimagining communal belonging beyond fixed identities.

Ivana Ivković, MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST - AFTERPIECE, part of the project SauerPowerKlubnacht by Slavs and Tatars, Berlin/DE, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Hue Hale. Commissioned by Humboldt Forum Museum.

MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST – PORT

Ivana Ivković’s site-specific performance MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST – PORT extends her ongoing investigation of the body as a site of collective and historical inscription. Presented within a maritime and port-city context, the performance resonates with themes of departure, arrival, and displacement, situating the male body in relation to fluid geographies of migration and memory. Ivković employs non-professional performers whose presence emphasizes vulnerability and authenticity, transforming the stage into a space of both exposure and contemplation.

The work confronts inherited narratives of belonging and exile, while at the same time proposing the body itself as a provisional monument—unstable, permeable, yet inscribed with shared histories. In this way, PORT contributes to Ivković’s broader MONUMENT cycle by articulating how fragile corporeality and transitory spaces may become critical tools for reimagining community in an age of uncertainty.

Ivana Ivković, MONUMENT: NO ONE IS LOST - PORT, mala voadora, Porto/PT, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Moritz Stettner. Commissioned by Hošek Contemporary Berlin and mala voadora, Porto.

AFTER YOU

AFTER YOU unfolds as a multimedia and transdisciplinary performance-installation exploring intimacy, care, and the psychological aftermath of the Yugoslav breakup. Set within an environment resembling an abandoned TV studio, the work situates performers in acts of closeness and hesitation—holding, resting, mirroring—amid projections that double and displace their gestures. Fragments of Jordan Cvetanović’s dramatic text, interwoven with pop-cultural and media references from the 1990s and 2000s, echo through the space, evoking a collective state of suspension between collapse and renewal.

Ivković stages vulnerability not as spectacle but as a site of tenderness and resistance, foregrounding gender fluidity and transgenerational dialogue. Through its hybrid form—part performance, part installation, part expanded cinema—AFTER YOU reflects on the fragility of intimacy and identity in post-conflict societies. The work immerses viewers in a space of instability and emotional resonance, asking: Where are we, and who is directing this?

Ivana Ivković, AFTER YOU, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Belgrade/RS, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Ivan Zupanc, Bojana Janjić.

I ONLY WANT TO LOVE ME

I ONLY WANT T LOVE ME was staged inside the cavernous hull of a boat on the Spree, explores intimacy, vulnerability, and the fragile negotiation of selfhood. The raw, metallic enclosure of the ship amplifies the performers’ exposed bodies, transforming the vessel into both shelter and stage, a liminal architecture suspended between stability and drift. Ivković arranges the bodies in minimal gestures and resting positions, evoking both collectivity and solitude, while the wooden planks beneath them resonate with a history of transport, weight and displacement.

The title points to the paradox of self-directed love—an insistence on self-affirmation that simultaneously reveals isolation and precarity. In this way, the performance situates corporeality within a fragile ecology of space, desire, and belonging, extending Ivković’s critical exploration of the body as monument and vessel of unresolved subjectivity.

Ivana Ivković, I ONLY WANT TO LOVE ME, Hošek Contemporary, Berlin/DE, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Hue Hale.

LINES, ROWS, COLUMNS (DORMITORY)

LINES, ROWS, COLUMNS (DORMITORY) is a site-specific performance-installation that stages the male body within a grid of repetition, intimacy, and control. Twenty-five nude performers lie curled on traditional carpets arranged in a precise 5×5 formation, interspersed with potted plants. Every thirty minutes, they turn in unison—a quiet choreography of discipline and desire. The rigid geometry of rows and columns evokes the order of military dormitories, yet the performers’ exposed vulnerability softens the system’s structure, transforming discipline into tenderness.

Within this fragile equilibrium, Ivković examines how bodies are positioned within social and political architectures, and how collectivity and solitude coexist within them. Through the interplay of stillness and movement, LINES, ROWS, COLUMNS (DORMITORY) becomes a living tableau of endurance, trust, and belonging—a meditation on the body’s capacity for both compliance and resistance that reverberates across Ivković’s later performative cycles.

Ivana Ivković, LINES, ROWS, COLUMNS (DORMITORY), October Salon, Museum of Belgrade, Belgrade/RS, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Ivan Zupanc, Boris Burić.

THE BASE OF TRUST

THE BASE OF TRUST serves as the prologue to Ivana Ivković’s regional performance cycle MONUMENT OF TRUST, an ongoing exploration of corruption as both social symptom and state of mind. Within the domestic intimacy of a salon apartment turned into a gallery space, the performance unfolds as a negotiation between exposure and concealment, complicity and renewal. At its center lies an antique carpet of considerable age and historical weight—a charged surface that acts simultaneously as ground, stage, and symbolic fabric of collective memory.

The performers’ gestures of cleaning, rubbing, and maintaining evoke both the erasure of traces and the persistence of care, transforming male labor into a quiet ritual of reparation. Through repetition and physical exertion, Ivković exposes the invisible mechanisms of corruption while reframing vulnerability as a form of resistance. Unfolding as a durational act suspended between devotion and exhaustion, THE BASE OF TRUST materializes trust not as permanence but as maintenance—an ongoing, fragile practice of rebuilding amidst uncertainty.

Ivana Ivković, THE BASE OF TRUST, prologue of MONUMENT OF TRUST, Non Canonico, Belgrade/RS, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Filip Koludrović.

IN HIM WE TRUST

Realized at the Bitef Theatre in Belgrade, IN HIM WE TRUST is a nine-hour site-specific performance that unfolds within a space originally conceived as a cathedral but later transformed into a theatre, turning it into a living monument of faith, power, and vulnerability. On a monumental scaffold, naked and semi-naked male bodies form shifting constellations, evoking the iconography of the Last Judgment while subverting its divine hierarchy. What emerges is not transcendence, but the fragile humanity of exposure, endurance, and collapse.

The performers—men of diverse social and professional backgrounds—sustain an exhausting physical presence that blurs the line between discipline and devotion. Their bodily fatigue becomes a meditation on trust and authority, where domination and tenderness coexist. The audience, free to move through the space, becomes both witness and participant in this shared act of contemplation. As the concluding part of Ivković’s trilogy on patriarchy and faith, IN HIM WE TRUST reconfigures the sacred narrative into an intimate mirror. It invites viewers to confront their own position within systems of belief and judgment, asking what remains of trust when the body itself becomes the site of revelation.

Ivana Ivković, IN HIM WE TRUST, Bitef Theatre, Belgrade/RS, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Ivan Zupanc.

BABYLON THE GREAT

The performance BABYLON THE GREAT marks a pivotal moment in Ivana Ivković’s practice, bringing together drawing, installation, and performance in a dense reflection on excess, desire, and collapse. Within a scaffolding structure transformed by foam and artificial snow, semi-naked bodies occupy unstable, fragile positions between exposure and retreat. The imagery recalls both the spectacle of abundance and the vulnerability of downfall, situating the performers as living monuments to transience.

Evoking the biblical figure of Babylon as a symbol of power, seduction, and ruin, the work confronts the audience with the tension between fascination and judgment, spectacle and fragility. Through its immersive staging, BABYLON THE GREAT anticipates Ivković’s later performative cycles, positioning the body as both vulnerable matter and critical site of resistance, while foregrounding the unstable foundations upon which cultural and political myths are constructed.

Ivana Ivković, BABYLON THE GREAT, Eugster II Belgrade, Belgrade/RS, 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Boris Burić, Ivan Zupanc.