Date: 01/04/2011 until 19/04/2011

Location: Gallery KiBela, Maribor – Slovenia

Organisers / Producers:  ACE KIBLA

Art is always posing questions about impulses that bring an artist to the processes and results we call artworks, and about duties of an artist as an important element of any given society. In this heterogeneous time of parallel worlds it is impossible to find a uniform answer to this complex question. In spite of the relativity of the role and the position of an artist in the contemporary society, no artist can avoid their own lives being present in their production. First-hand experience or imaginary impulses are reflected as the most significant impact field which authors transform on the basis on their own ethical and world-view perspectives, be it society-related or strictly intimate by nature. All fiction and social commentary holds a piece of their author’s reality, each imagination brings reference to past experience, and each dream is a specific version of reality. Therefore, the simplest, the most effective and the only sensible way to comprehend the artistic production of Dan Oki is through the course of his life, which can give the most thorough answer to any question about the positioning and interpretation of his wide-ranging, experiment-based expression.
In the case of Dan Oki we need to go back to his early childhood, when he was given a super 8mm camera as a present. This marked the start of a great obsession of filming various sometimes very particular and seemingly trivial situations in his environment: after merely documenting his surroundings at first, he later – influenced by the rich tradition of experimental film – started to explore more complexly designed narratives and formal impacts of film language. Despite his young age and an amateur approach, his early films reflected special poetics and an immense devotion to this medium, which he was taking in by eruditely following film production. While studying political science and journalism at the Zagreb faculty, Oki tried to make his infinite love of creative production formal and enter an arts or film academy, but with no success. Thus, he bypassed the classical art education, which directs a young artist to a well-trodden path to technical command of drawing and painting, introduction to the theory of visual arts and a wider insight into the history of contemporary art currents. This was one of the reasons for his expression to remain highly specific: as an artist he stayed true to film as a means of self-expression of his original aspirations, he took up performance as an instrument of direct expression through the object-like nature of your own body and mind as the basic carriers of meaning, and photography to document these activities, which were usually unannounced and realised in the absence of an audience. 1991 brought a radical change. Dan Oki was accepted to De Vrije Art Academy in Den Haag, the Netherlands. Meanwhile, a war and a dark decade of ideological tension started in his home country. This all had a big impact on his further development as an individual and as an author. His new environment brought him the possibility to experiment more thoroughly with new media, which opened up new worlds in the field of motion picture as the core of his creative production. Since the moment he entered more determinedly the field of diverse artistic media, which he started to mix and match, his overall expression has acquired entirely new dimensions, new impetus and new focal points, without giving up his specific (film-inspired) starting point. As an artist he had been facing his personal and professional challenges by relying on his Dutch context and international collaborations, until he suddenly returned home, where he now teaches at the Split Arts Academy and works as a distinctively multimedia oriented artist. In his work, Dan Oki combines principles of what often seems incompatible: experimental film, computer database, video, computer animation, photography, performance, web projects and feature film. He brings all these tools, media and means together to conceptually comprehend individual elements; whether the focus is on formal explorations or on the narrative, the final arbiter is always the spectator.

Kibla photo archive (Photo: Boštjan Lah)