page_title: Sanja Iveković
section_title: Lady Rosa of Luxembourg
hierarchical_section_title: Sanja Iveković / Lady Rosa of Luxembourg
caption_attribution_description: English: "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg" by Sanja Ivekovic; exhibited in Luxembourg City in 2001
context_page_description: Sanja Iveković is a Croatian photographer, performer, sculptor and installation artist. Her work is known to tackle such issues as female identity, media, consumerism, and political strife. Considered to be one of the leading artists from the former Yugoslavia, she continues to inspire many young artists.
context_section_description: Referring to perhaps her most famous piece Iveković says, "In all my work since the beginning of the seventies," Iveković has written, "three major themes have preoccupied me the most: gender, identity, and memory. For me, as a visual artist, the starting point of my research is the visual representation of woman in our everyday life transmitted to us by mass media. As a feminist, I have tried to make art that reflects my political consciousness of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal culture." 
  One of Iveković's most notable pieces has been the "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg" sculpture. In 2001, she replicated Luxembourg's national symbol Gëlle Fra (Golden Lady) by making the woman look visibly pregnant, naming her after Rosa Luxembourg, and by altering the accompanying plaque's text to read "WHORE, BITCH, MADONNA, VIRGIN." Topping an obelisk which for some time was placed in the vicinity of the original, her "Rosa Luxembourg" caused considerable consternation. The most vocal complaints were about the plaque's language, with calls for Erna Hennicot-Schoepges, Luxembourg's minister of culture, to resign. The sculpture was recreated during Iveković's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011, in which the New York Times stated:
  Named for the Marxist philosopher and activist Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by Berlin police during the thwarted German Revolution of 1919, this work caused a furor when it was exhibited in Luxembourg in 2001, in part because it was displayed in a public park within sight of a nearly identical but unpregnant sculpture that is a war monument. Wall vitrines lined with newspaper clippings attest to the extensive press coverage it received, as do excerpts from television news interviews playing on monitors.“Lady Rosa” clearly functioned as a kind of lightning rod, as interesting for what it set off as for what it actually was. In one television interview a young man points out that people were more offended by the words on the sculpture’s base than by the fact that countless women and children are beaten and abused every day.
caption: "Rosa Luxembourg", the pregnant Gëlle Fra