In Un jour violente (1976) Sanja Iveković transforms the language of commercial advertising into a performance that exposes the social construction of femininity. The work takes its structure from a beauty feature published in Marie Claire, which instructed women on how to embody different moods through makeup, clothing, and attitude. The advert suggests: ‘One day, violent: today you are dazzling... you feel irresistible joy... you want sparkling drinks, intensive light, provoking dresses’. For the performance, Iveković recreated the advertisement’s design as a three-part installation titled Un jour tendre, Un jour violente, and Un jour secrète. She applied makeup, drank refreshments, and changed outfits while her recorded narration of the advert’s text played through loudspeakers.

By literally enacting the instructions of a beauty campaign, Iveković revealed the tension between glamour and aggression embedded in the media’s portrayal of women. The work situates the female body as a contested site, one shaped by ideals of seduction, consumption, and control. Combining irony and critique, Un jour violente reflects Iveković’s ongoing examination of how mass media scripts gendered behaviour, turning the language of self-expression into a subtle form of discipline. In this video component of the performance, the female body is presented as a social battleground, reified by the magazine and beauty industries, where here, specifically, Marie Claire magazine equates glamour and desire with violence. The seemingly edgy yet supposed benevolent PR is, on the contrary, revealed as an absurd contributing technology of the forced construction of women’s identities.