General Alert (Soap Opera)
/5
- General Alert (Soap Opera)
- Opća opasnost (Soap Opera)
- 1995
- video, color, sound
- 6min, 38sec
For “General Alert”, as well as for some other of her earlier video works (“Looking At”, 1974, “Sweet Violence”, 1974), Sanja Iveković used a television show. Another work, “TV Timeru” (1973), which she realized in cooperation with Dalibor Martinis, saw her intervene directly in the politically structured public space of Austrian national television with a series of individual artistic messages. In “General Alert”, however, the artist introduced institutionalized programming into the individual and private sphere. This video was made in 1995 during the Yugoslav Wars, as the Yugoslav army was shelling towns and villages in Croatia. Despite the gravity of the situation, people were trying to “live normally”—and as they were trying to have some fun watching soaps and movies on their televisions, the caption with air raid warning would appear on the screen telling citizens to go to shelters, jolting them back into reality. The artist realized two videos on this topic: in one, the caption “General alert in Zagreb” appears at the bottom of the screen while a popular Latin American TV soap is running, and in another, “General alert in Valpovo and Belišce” appears during Jean-Luc Godard’s “À bout de soufflé” / “Breathless”. B.S.