Video Still, Grand Organ, 2010
Single-channel video installation, HD video transferred to Blu-ray disc, 13 mins
Original music by Bojan Vuletic
Director of Photography: Egbert Trogemann
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2010, Touched
Project supporters:
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Goethe-Institut Manchester
Trained as a painter in Germany, Danica Dakić’s practice and approach to art-making twisted during the war in Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996). The artist (only remotely – if at all – connected to her home-country, family and friends) translated in a series of paintings entitled WHITE PICTURES the sense of loss and disconnection she was experiencing by devising constructivist-inspired and architecturally structured compositions. These works were almost an exercise of self-discipline, as the same artist maintains, a means for keeping her grounded and steady in a moment of uncertainty.
After a period of self-imposed isolation, during which Dakić refrained from publicly exhibiting her work, in 1996 she presented BLAUES AUGE, an installation comprising thousands of paper cuttings collected over a period of several years concerning the war in Yugoslavia. Applied to windows and kept together by a transparent film, the news from the war impeded any visual dialogue between the outside and inside of the gallery space. The piece not only highlighted the lack of communication with her motherland throughout the conflict, but ostensibly envisioned the opacity of the information provided by the media.
Ever since, although her work can still be arguably defined as pictorial, the artist has gradually abandoned painting in favour of other forms of artistic expression, such as video, photography, sound and text.
Film and video-installation, in particular, have proved to be an efficient tool of formal research for Dakić. Most noticeably in pieces such as Tauber Tanz (2003), where she recorded a group of people performing a music-less traditional dance from Bosnia-Herzegovina only punctuated by the voice of the dance leader, or El Dorado, an ambitious project commissioned to the artist on the occasion of Documenta 12 in 2006-2007. This last work, that takes its title from a wall-paper motif preserved at the Tapetenmuseum in Kassel, shows the multiplicity of approaches and complexity of the artist’s practice, comprising performance, photography, film, choreography, archival research, craft and fashion.
