Danica Dakic

Danica Dakić was born in 1962 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina. After studying at the Academy of Arts in Sarajevo (1981-1985), she attended the University of Arts in Belgrade from 1985 to 1988 and graduated in painting. From 1988 to 1990 she studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, among others with Nam June Paik. Since 2011, she has been a professor of art in public space and new artistic strategies at Bauhaus University Weimar. In addition to solo exhibitions at the Generali Foundation, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, she has participated in numerous major exhibitions, including documenta 12 (2007), the Istanbul Biennial (2009) and the Liverpool Biennial (2010). At the 58th Biennale di Venezia (2019), she represented Bosnia and Herzegovina in the country pavilion. In November 2021, Dakić was the first recipient of the Lauterbach Prize for Social Art of the Carl and Ruth Lauterbach Foundation. Danica Dakić lives and works in Düsseldorf, Weimar and Sarajevo.

Danica Dakić’s main themes are issues related to identity, homeland, and culture, with which she grapples in extremely diverse media—from drawing to photography, video and sound works, and performance through to sculptural objects. Against the backdrop of her experience of migration, playing an important role in her work are language and role models as well as their significance in light of social change, globalization processes, and war. Characteristic of her work filming at sites of particular socio-cultural brilliance are the artist’s care and empathy in the collaboration with her protagonists. This lends the works their special sensibility, dissociating them from voyeurism and the usual documentary character.