*blumen* - künstlerresidenz : Damir Očko

JANUARY - APRIL 2010

The media artist and film-maker Damir Očko was born in 1977 in Zagreb, Croatia, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (1997-2003). Today he still lives and works in Zagreb.
Video, film, performance, sculpture, graphic and music are all tools in his work that are utilized in order to grasp the density of a given situation. Ranging in between the edges of reality and fiction the artist documents reality, while maintaining critical distance from it. Instead of focusing on the issue he rather tends to explore the potential in subjects placed within his work. Adopting this potential to the given circumstances, space plays host to staged actions and performances, reflecting the environment in which they appear. In most recent works the artist adopts a poetic assertions, particularly effective at drawing our attention to subtle transformations of the facts, myths and potentials unlimited to the notions of time.

Damir Očko presented his work in several galleries and museums, in solo exhibitions at the Lothringer 13-Kunsthalle Munich, at the Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art and at the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art among others. Recent group exhibitions were at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski in Warsaw, Le Fresnoy-National Center for Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, International Triennial of Contemporary Art, National Gallery, Prague and Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney among others.
Damir Ocko was granted resident fellowships from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Helsinki International Artist-in Residence Programme (HIAP), the Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art, and KulturKontakt Vienna.
Damir Očko is represented by Tiziana di Caro Gallery, Salerno, Italy.

artist's webseite: www.damirocko.com

EVENT HORIZON

During his stay in Leipzig, Damir Očko realizes a new works referring to the analogy of the Event Horizon which is a scientific description for „the point of no return“, a boundary in space and time beyond which an event cannot affect an outside observer.
Besides new drawings and collages the artist develops a new film project focussing on the system of movements within the sign language. Using movements to tell a story in a form of a song, he hides the obvious in the content.