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
