In recent years, Damir Očko realized an especially interesting body of work that comprises of six films: The Boy with a Magic Horn (2007), End of the World (2007), The Age of Happiness (2009), The Moon Shall Never Take My Voice (2010), We saw nothing but the uniform blue of the sky (2012), and the last one, Spring (2012).
Očko’s artistic production, which besides the film works encompasses series of visual and graphic elements, such as collages, typographic music sheets, concrete poetry, and artist’s books, is structured around film as its central place; film is conceived as a construction that gathers and generates several formal elements, so as to produce meaning, associations, and emotions. We “read” Damir Očko’s works as complex and layered orchestrations, meeting places of various narratives and texts, pointing to their multi-layered riches. Očko emphasizes that it is precisely in multi-layeredness, in structure of surgical precision, where the essence of his work is to be found. The artist often puts the viewers in the role of explorers, ready to absorb the layers of meaning, either rationally or intuitively and suggestively, as new systems of knowledge articulation.
The author’s interest in music, in sounds, in the “apparatus” of human voice and speech, and in their poetic and politic potential – these are the leading preoccupations of Damir Očko, and they are especially pronounced in the selected films. In these works, Očko elaborates complex cinematic relations, employs layered dramaturgic processes and uses them to create visually impressive works of specific kinesthetic qualities. A specific choreography of protagonists’ movements, darkness that engulfs them, their actions, their movements and the language of cinematic means of expression – all this additionally enhances the meaning that progressively reveals itself through interaction of all the elements, as the film draws us into its associative space of relations between reality and fiction.
Program:
Spring, 4k converted to HD; color, sound, 19.58 min, 2012.
We saw nothing but the Uniform blue of the sky, 4k converted to HD; bw/color, 12 min; 2012.
The Moon shall never take my Voice, HD video, color, sound; 19.16 min, 2010.
The program encompasses films that were included in Očko’s solo exhibition The Kingdom of Glottis, held from October 2012 to February 2013 in Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Damir Očko realized the following solo exhibitions: The Kingdom of Glottis, Palais de Tokyo (2012), The Body Score, Yvon Lambert, Paris (2013), On Ulterior Scale, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf (2011) and MMC Luka, Pula (2012); he also had solo shows in Tiziana di Caro Gallery (Salerno), Kunstverein Leipzig, Kunsthalle München. He participated in collective exhibitions in the MSU Zagreb; Villa Romana, Florence; Kunsthalle Wien; HIAP Helsinki, and in festivals: Videoformes Clermont Ferrand, 25FPS, Zagreb; Videobrasil; and in residences (Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; Academie Schllos Solitude, KulturKontakt, Vienna.)
ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a program activity of the MSU that begun in 2012, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program will present recent film/video works outside the context of social production of entertainment and spectacle. It will complete the programmatic conception of the MSU and complement the presentation of this hybrid form. We will intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way we will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving pictures.
Project Manager: Tihomir Milovac
Curator: Branka Benčić