Danica Dakic
22 Jan - 16 May 2010
DANICA DAKIC
"Role-Taking, Role-Making"
Opening: January 21, 2010, 7 p.m.
Exhibition duration: Januar 22 through May 16, 2010
Allegories of transience and their visual equivalents play a central role in the world theater of Danica Dakić (born in 1962 in Sarajevo). In the media of video, film, and photography, the Düsseldorf-based artist examines values and concepts that are subject to dramatic changes, for example as a result of war or loss—changes that leave traces in history, language, and cultural identity.
Dakić’s own experience as a migrant places these issues in a particular light, creating a heightened sensitivity to processes involving exclusion, flight, displacement, understanding, stereotyping, and cultural memory.What is freedom, Dakic asks, for example, in her video Role-Taking, Role-Making. Is being uprooted an opportunity and not just a source of alienation? What do the loss of language and the ability to express oneself in words mean in new surroundings? Which roles are imposed on us?
The babble of many tongues, the significance of the particular in the local as opposed to the universality of globalization, the power of oral tradition as opposed to the written word, storytelling as a builder of identity, the cross-cultural power of the voice, of sound, of music—all these aspects feature in Dakićs image and sound collages.
But instead of addressing them directly, her point of view is one of distanced observation and contained instruction, using a narrative technique based, among others, on the genre of the tableau vivant. By such means of rhetorical alienation, reality is turned not into a documentary but into an artificial, at times fragmentary form in which stereotypes can be cast off and reality is reconceived via fictionalization.
Curator: Sabine Folie
Assistant Curator: Georgia Holz
Exhibition organized by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf gGmbH in cooperation with Generali Foundation, Vienna and Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
[and funded by the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia]
"Role-Taking, Role-Making"
Opening: January 21, 2010, 7 p.m.
Exhibition duration: Januar 22 through May 16, 2010
Allegories of transience and their visual equivalents play a central role in the world theater of Danica Dakić (born in 1962 in Sarajevo). In the media of video, film, and photography, the Düsseldorf-based artist examines values and concepts that are subject to dramatic changes, for example as a result of war or loss—changes that leave traces in history, language, and cultural identity.
Dakić’s own experience as a migrant places these issues in a particular light, creating a heightened sensitivity to processes involving exclusion, flight, displacement, understanding, stereotyping, and cultural memory.What is freedom, Dakic asks, for example, in her video Role-Taking, Role-Making. Is being uprooted an opportunity and not just a source of alienation? What do the loss of language and the ability to express oneself in words mean in new surroundings? Which roles are imposed on us?
The babble of many tongues, the significance of the particular in the local as opposed to the universality of globalization, the power of oral tradition as opposed to the written word, storytelling as a builder of identity, the cross-cultural power of the voice, of sound, of music—all these aspects feature in Dakićs image and sound collages.
But instead of addressing them directly, her point of view is one of distanced observation and contained instruction, using a narrative technique based, among others, on the genre of the tableau vivant. By such means of rhetorical alienation, reality is turned not into a documentary but into an artificial, at times fragmentary form in which stereotypes can be cast off and reality is reconceived via fictionalization.
Curator: Sabine Folie
Assistant Curator: Georgia Holz
Exhibition organized by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf gGmbH in cooperation with Generali Foundation, Vienna and Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
[and funded by the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia]