Iva Kovač to Take Over as Programme Director of the City of Women
We are extremely happy to announce that the City of Women team has been enriched by artist and curator Iva Kovač as the new programme director. Before directing the City of Women’s programme, Iva Kovač was head of the PM and Prsten galleries of the Croatian Society of Fine Artists in Zagreb (2010–2012). She curated and headed the programme of the SIZ gallery in Rijeka (2013–2015). Since 2017, she has been programme selector and organizer of activities for the artistic organization GSG in Rijeka, where in 2018, she founded the magazine Časopis za društvo i umjetnost within the scope of the artistic organization GSG, and the third issue is soon to come out. Since 2012, Iva Kovač is also active as a member of the artistic collective Fokus Grupa. Within its framework, she has exhibited and collaborated with numerous cultural organizations in Slovenia and internationally. Furthermore, she prepared a summer seminar for the students of the Innsbrück Institute for Architectural Theory as the recipient of the artistic residency grant Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. Iva Kovač: “I am taking over the programme direction of the City of Women from several reasons. Most of all, I admire the activities and the longterm persistence of the city of Women in addressing extremely important issues for contemporary and performing arts, and perhaps even more importantly, for feminist critique. Already at the start of my own artistic path, I got to know the City of Women as one of the early ‘venues’ arousing interest due to openly feminist creativity. I am extremely glad to anticipate my role in the creation of the programme of this organization that has kept its great relevance since my artistic beginnings throughout its organizing and curating activities later on. In the following years, I shall strive to pursue and expand the current practices of the City of Women. I will be looking into the necessities of today’s period, considering their dependence on the existent, hard-rooted inequalities. I shall start by addressing more acute issues, however, by attempting to solve more chronic problems of historization and assessment of the (artistic) work of women and gender non-conforming persons, as well as fair compensation for that work. Among my plans for next year, I would like to mention our collaboration with local and international artists and theoreticians, through which the City of Women plans to research unusual race constellations* in Eastern Europe. The local population here has been defined historically by using ethnically marked or even racist vocabulary, which is evident from examples from the 1990s, as of yet still very much present in our collective memory, but simultaneously, we took part in that ourselves when discussing people from further eastern or southern regions.”
*Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018).
