PARIS PHOTO 2015
DANICA DAKIĆ IN THE GANDY GALLERY
Danica Dakić’s photographic work is significant in its own right within her oeuvre. Clearly it is created in connection with her video and sound installations, her participatory projects and performances, and can be interpreted in this context, but her photographs are in no way video stills, making-ofs, or set photographs. These precise and well thought out compositions are often the result of a lengthy production process and intensive work with the participants of her photographs, which confers on them a unique, both allegorical and transitory role within the teatrum mundi of the particular work and suspends any attribution of stereotypes.
The four-part photographic series La Grande Galerie from 2004 demonstrates how complex historical, art historical, and contemporary narratives are linked in Dakić’s work. The fictionalized dystopia of picturesque ruins by Hubert Robert, from which the series takes its title, that arose after the chaos of the French Revolution and the “world museum” that then opened up, is the starting point of a dialogue with Roma refugees from Kosovo. Before the artist travelled to Kosovo, she had a huge reproduction of the painting made. In a Roma enclave, she asked a family to pose in front of it. Two further paintings from the Louvre collection, Nicolas Régnier’s The Fortune Teller (ca. 1626) and Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (1635), were used by the actors to engage with the “Gipsy” roles assigned to them and which they have assumed. In a container camp for Roma refugees in Kosovo, Robert’s allegorical picture of cultural transience and symbolic placelessness takes a further interpretation. The living conditions of the people there are neither glossed over nor romanticised, their precarious status is mentioned almost casually. At the same time the picture is about the rubble and vacant spots in collective memory, which in times of great upheavals prevent the assembly of any coherent images.
Conceptually, Dakić proceeds in a similar way in her three-part work series El Dorado (2007), which was created for the Documenta 12 in Kassel in close collaboration with the photographer and cameraman Egbert Trogemann. In El Dorado the artist uses the panorama wallpaper of the same name, manufactured for the first time in 1849, for her picture-in-a-picture, which introduces a new way of reading the hybrid structure of historical traditions of depiction. The title Gießbergstraße refers to the address of a home for unaccompanied minor refugees in Kassel. With the young people living there, the artist developed performative actions and interviews in which they expressed their ideas of happiness, luck, assertiveness, and lifestyle in front of the fictional paradise on the exotic backdrop.
In these photographic works, Dakić combines the traditions of the tableaux vivants and Baroque rhetoric of images with the posed studio photographs of the nineteenth century. Her images also recall the strategies used in early ethnographic photography or the rediscovered autochrome plates by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn from
the early twentieth century. However, the people Dakić portrays shift the stereotyped picturesque models by defining the roles themselves or playfully empowering them. The clarity of the images selected, the classical compositions, the light–dark dramaturgy of the lighting, the staging of the actors in front of what looks like theatrical scenery or painted wallpapers, and the elaboration of colour nuances in the picture bear witness to the artist’s aesthetic dispositions, which she also brings to the photographic images.
“I think like a painter. I believe in pictures and in their explosive aesthetic force.” (Danica Dakić)
In the light of this context, the large-format photograph Isola Bella (2007) is programmatic, where she again uses the reproduction of a historical panorama wallpaper. The image evoking the myth of a carefree life in a paradisiacal setting, which stands abandoned in a grey winter landscape, seems decidedly out of place, but nevertheless invokes the belief in and the power of an individual’s development and utopias.
The photograph Safe Frame III from 2012 is just as emblematic and complex, although at first sight it seems to have been captured during a chance encounter. Blurred and out of focus, the picture of a group of women shines out of a golden frame that they are carrying together. Unlike in a “safe frame”, a term from digital image technology for displaying the rendered portion of an image, there is no sharp image of the women. This is because the women are actually behind the golden frame, which is empty and instead of glass has a transparent foil through which their bodies appear as shadows — also a metaphorical statement on the current controversy about how (media) images of people are produced.
(The Baroque picture frame was first used as a prop for an installation in the MMK Frankfurt, in which 23 women from crisis-torn countries reflected on freedom and security while engaging with works in the museum’s collection. The starting point of the project was again a historical photograph by Paul Almásy from 1942, which documented a protest action by museum staff at the Louvre. The staff had removed numerous works of art from their frames to keep them safe from confiscation by the Nazis.)
In many of her works, Sarajevo-born Danica Dakić, who now lives in Düsseldorf, addresses the importance of living in several languages and cultures, of speaking out and of being heard. Her early — and so far only — black-and-white photograph A Cappella from 2002 (an analogue double exposure, vintage gelatin silver print on barite paper), is an example of the unusual images the artist creates. The subject’s facial expression of deep contemplation is literally “overwritten” by a babble of voices speaking in many languages.
With her five-part photo series of young girls performing sign language, Dakić again addresses the rhetorical power of images. The actors in this series of works, formed for the Liverpool Biennial 2010, are members of The Liverpool Signing Choir, an innovative British choir project.
All the girls are seen in head and shoulders portraits in front of a dark background, and are completely concentrating on their act of signing speech. In these photographs, the artist moves in very close to her protagonists, but always observes a balance between proximity and distance. Yet the finely drawn expression on the girls’ faces is difficult to reconcile with the grammar of their hands and gestures for those who do not understand their language, in this case, British Sign Language.
In all her photographs, the trust is palpable that the people depicted and portrayed, always lay persons, bring to the situation of active staging and individual authenticity. Here Dakić functions as director; she explores the most important aspects and the beauty of human identity with empathy, and creates a stage on which unique and individual narratives can be developed that lie beyond all fixed notions of the political, social, or economic.
“I want to create spaces, which my protagonists can break out of. Spaces, in which desires can be formulated that enable people to reach places, which before were unthinkable”.
Sabine Maria Schmidt