2006
video / installation / watercolours
Lala Rascic’s project The Invisible General : Night of the Iguana gives a refreshingly different slant on the recent war history of this region. The antihero is the former “most wanted” Croatian fugitive and war criminal* Ante Gotovina. During his long-term hiding from the Hague Tribunal, he was omnipresent in Croatian media and urban reality, as a phantom hero brought to the ultimate abstraction of identity. The frenzied propagandistic reproductions of his name and visage in public spaces was a result of political instrumentalization and right-wing mythologization of his persona as well as of his image. Media hagiography and collective fantasy about the most wanted and elusive fugitive culminated in the form actual “literary production”.
In addition to his biography, an erotic novel written by a retired stewardess from the island of Brač has also been published. In the videos of the installation Invisible General: Night of the Iguana, the novel appears as a stylized interpretation by Lala Raščić – but also in documentary footage of the stewardess-author who is seen reading lascivious passages about her fictional nights of passion with the general in her garden on Brač. In the same space, the artist places her series of watercolour renditions of the “invisible general”. The figure of Gotovina has been erased from the photographs that had been flooding public spaces for years. The artist approaches a national fugitive without direct political agenda, in other words, she traces the genesis of contemporary myth making through the politics of representation, and looks at media-manipulated appropriation giving way to erotic desire, as the dark side of h/Eros.
(adapted from the text by Jasna Jakšić, foreword for the Heroes in Transition exhibition, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, 2007)
*Ante Gotovina was on the run from 2000 to 2005, when he was arrested in Tenerife. He spent seven years in The Hague detention center, from where he was released in 2012, after the court declared him innocent.
The Invisible General : Night of the Iguana
List of exibits:
– Night of the Iguana, video, 5’
– Sinaja Reads, video, 9’
– The Invisible General, seried of 7 watercolors, 70 x 100 each
– Memorabilia, artifacts and media clippings
Lala Raščić 