ASK the Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic about her work, and she is likely to minimize her role in it. “It is not a genius that is making art but the collaboration of many people,“ she declared this month, speaking in heavily accented English, as she strode into the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. “We should be grateful not to God for giving us our talent but to the people who support us.”

Ms. Ivekovic was attending — along with Roxana Marcoci, the Modern’s curator of photography, and a huge installation crew — to the last details of her first American survey show, “Sweet Violence,” which opened at the museum last Sunday and runs through March 26. It gathers nearly 40 years’ worth of work by the 62-year-old artist, starting with the videos, performances and photocollages that made her name in Europe in the early 1970s and extending to more recent projects like “Women’s House,” a continuing series of multimedia works and events begun in 2002 in collaboration with women’s rights groups around the world.

Though little known here, Ms. Ivekovic is something of a cult figure in Europe, where she has long shown in exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, Documenta and Manifesta and in the last five years has had solo exhibitions at several museums. For Europeans, part of the draw is that her work addresses their common political history, with all its fissures, in a way that “drags the specters out into the light and allows us to confront them,” said Charles Esche, the director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, which surveyed her career in 2009.