Instructions No. 2 (2015) revisits and reinterprets the artists seminal 1976 video work, Instructions No. 1, nearly forty years later. In both works, the artist faces the camera directly, methodically drawing black arrows across her face. We see lines and arrows drawn on her forehead, cheeks, and chin, enacting a gesture that evokes cosmetic diagrams, beauty tutorials, or surgical markings surgeons make prior to cutting, shaping and transforming the face. The act unfolds slowly and deliberately, transforming a seemingly banal ritual of self-care or preliminary act of surgery into a meditation on representation, control, and time.

In this updated version, Iveković repeats the gestures of her younger self with precision, yet the passage of time is not only inscribed in her face and her movements, but also in the technology that records her. The contrast between the original and the remake exposes a dialogue between bodily aging and technological evolution, mirroring broader shifts in the political and cultural landscape from socialist Yugoslavia to post-transition Croatia. While much is viscerally revealed, what remains concealed is the ongoing operations of power and control that remain consistent regardless of the march of time.

While the markings are eventually rubbed into the skin, leaving traces, their symbolic weight lingers even more so. The work continues Iveković’s long-standing critique of how women’s bodies are inscribed by beauty standards, media imagery, and ideological expectations. Originally framed by what the artist termed ‘sweet violence’, the updated piece extends this reflection to encompass questions of history, memory, and continuity. The body and its mediating technologies may change, but the forces that shape identity remain the same, occupying the territories and operations of the contemporary epoch just the same. Instructions No. 2 is not only a reenactment but an ongoing act of resistance. It is an intimate confrontation with time, identity, and the persistent social forces that shape the female image across generations and political systems.