Autoportrait

Danica Dakic

Autoportrait, 1999

Artwork text

The video installation Autoportrait is an iconic work of the turn of the millennium. With its presence in the room and its surreal symbolism, the image speaks to us on a positively physical level. Danica Dakić’s work blends painting and video: on the one hand, it is reminiscent of an Old-Masterly self-portrait; on the other hand, the artist harnesses the video medium with its possibilities—motion, light, sound—to bring the portrait to life. What is certainly out of the ordinary is the second mouth that appears where the eyes should be. The two mouths recite passages from fairy tales in Bosnian and German, with the two languages sometimes interweaving like echoes of each other. “The video installation strikes a raw nerve with a generation of people defined by uprooted identities: the face with the two mouths speaking different languages reflects the experience of migration and globalization, but also the potentials for manipulation unlocked by genetic engineering and medical technology as well as the digital universe, which increasingly affect the process in which our identities take shape and threaten to subvert it.” (Reinhard Spieler)(Jürgen Tabor)