Opening @ Sanja Ivekovic. 1976

- IVEKOVIC Sanja, Opening, 1976. Otvorenje, Gelrija suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, Galerie Tommaseo, Italie.

Performed at the opening of the artist’s solo exhibition in the Zagreb of Contemporary Art (1976) and later at the Tommaseo Gallery in trieste (1977), Opening is Sanja Ivekovic’s first performances thematizing the artist’s body. It is an explicit definition of the artist as an embodied (female) subject, who not only shows her art as an intellectual/aesthetic practice displayed on gallery walls but whose body, subjectivity, feeling, or literally ‘‘flesh’’, is inseparable from her work. The artist exposed herself in the gallery space, where she met each visitor who entered the gallery, her mouth sealed with tape eliminating all verbal/intellectual communicantion and a stethoscope connecting her body to the speakers that transmitted the sound of her heartbeat. Her contact with each visitor was photographed and later exhibited, together with corresponding recording of the heartbeat.