In her explicitly political and feminist early work, Sanja Iveković (*1949 in Zagreb, lives in Zagreb) examines gender-specific patterns and roles, casting a critical light on conventional notions of beauty and their dissemination in the mass media and addressing the considerable pressure they exert on female self-image. She was the first artist in the former Yugoslavia to publicly embrace feminism, understanding this as a gesture of disobedience against the Communist regime, which viewed feminism as an import from the West. Her later work also deals with historical topics such as the Yugoslav resistance movement against Hitler in World War II or the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.