In Make Up–Make Down, Iveković transforms the everyday act of applying makeup into a carefully staged, almost ritualistic performance, challenging conventional notions of femininity and beauty. The camera focuses tightly on her hands and upper body, capturing the intimate gestures of opening a concealer, twisting a lipstick, dipping a mascara wand, and tracing the tip of an eyeliner pencil. Her face remains deliberately offscreen, emphasizing the depersonalization inherent in media-driven ideals of appearance and highlighting the tension between private experience and public representation.

By slowing down the familiar routine, the artist converts it into a fetishized, almost obsessive meditation on the gestures and objects associated with female self-presentation. Each motion—once unconscious and utilitarian—acquires an intensified sensuality, layered with subtle erotic undertones. The work underscores how everyday beauty practices are informed by societal pressures and commercial imagery, revealing the hidden labour behind the polished appearances celebrated in magazines, television, and advertising.

The deliberate pacing and meticulous framing invite viewers to reconsider the ritualized nature of cosmetic application, while simultaneously critiquing the cultural obsession with perfection and conformity. By presenting only partial views of her body, Iveković destabilizes the traditional subject-object relationship in representations of women, exposing how identity and selfhood are shaped and constrained by external standards. Even though gender equality in socialist countries of the time, including Yugoslavia where Iveković was born and living at this time, had made greater gains than in the ‘West’, Make Up–Make Down offered a critique of the patriarchal expectations that persisted. In a socialist state where a somewhat ‘free market’ defined Yugoslavia in distinction from the USSR, it also reads as an exploration of intimacy, ritual, and the politics of gender representation in consumer society embedded in everyday acts.