MAKING DISPARATE WORLDS FAMILIAR

Daliborka Djuric's world of art is built with the needle and the thread, stitch by stitch, with successive, continuous, repetitive stitches and threading through the canvas. With her long and short stitches as well as with thick and thin treads, she achieves chromatically saturated and richly embossed coloured works. If one of her works is observed as a picture at first, and then as a needlepoint or a tapestry, the thread prints, their linear rhythm, density and volume will become the brush strokes, azure or pastuous. This mutual simulation or media whirl represent the author’s endeavour to make the skills, language and techniques, which are treated differently according to their hierarchy, familiar. Therefore, these works equally exist as both the art of textile with all its specific qualities as well as art with its rhetoric and laws.

The Manual – The Reflective – The Meditative

The basic artistic idea of this kind of opus relies on three powerful, seemingly disparate, but essentially inseperate creative axis – manual work, active mental engagement and emphasized conteplative thinking. The inertia of established beliefs 'pushes' the sewing and the embroidery into the sphere of a craft or quite decorative work. In modern times of frequent media excess and empowering of conceptual challenges, Daliborka's works are recognized as a pattern in which technical mastery, luxurious materialism and so called pure art gain upon each other.

The Old-New Technology

The most striking contradiction of this exhibition takes place on the very canvases on which, through the technique of embroidery, the artist expresses her desires for digital tecnology – a fast working computer, a hi-tech sewing machine and such. Although these statements make the manual act question itself, at the same time, it is about the artist's respect towards the classic medium and the creative need for using new smart programmes as tools for self-improvement and discovering desired techniques.

The Modern – The Postmodern

The empathic way of representing the human figure, the inclination towards the stylization of the form, the violation of classic proportions, the spontaneous childlike manipulation of colour, are some of the characteristics of humanistic legacy of the European Modernism which can be found in the very foundations of Daliborka's artistic upbringing. With it, she treads and sets off to hybrid and relieving postmodernistic freedoms – to quoting, to collaging and editing of different stylistic patterns and linguistic codes.

Quilt – The Extasy of Spectacle, the Extasy of Intimate

The series of quilts, the three-layered sewn cloths/covers, is directed towards taking the complete visual patterns and then parodying them or transforming their primary meanings. The planetary popular Oliver, Jamie Oliver, is represented in the exact pop-art manner, holding a tray with the winking apple, surrounded with Picasso-esque interjection – a sticker of a cubist character who uses a positive-interrogative sentence to question the authenticity of an organic product in the same way in which 'Pablo broke the tradition' and denied the organic unity of the human body. By connecting the familiar modernistic art quotation and the popular TV culinary superstar, the artist uses the critically humorous tone to comment the hypertrophy of gastronomy reality programmes. Annie Hall Forever - the adored acting couple Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, 'with their faces pasted' on serial patterns of male and female bodies, surrounded by samples of the embroidery 'a cottage in flowers', allude to cinematic and non cinematic linguistic dribblings and verbal quibbles of New York intellectuals living in their obsessive introspection of their own traumas and frustrations. See You in the Park – a motif word play of visions and shortened perspectives, of figures of parents and children, of mobile phones and of phantasmagoristic centipede walkers that is spread in a garden of idylic patchwork. It is a clipping of a so called everyday life, whose participants, like in the previous pictures, with the tip of their noses, wittily 'wiggle' their red clown ball – Daliborka's frequent portrait marker which she uses to light, to humour and to optimistically relax any life image.

The Canvas

Among the works done on a canvas with a sewing thread we find a series of characters and personalities, sample-persons through which the artist shows her desires and appeals to the fulfillment of her life needs in a artistic and magical way. Pippi Longstocking, the most complete work woven in thick yarn, is a figurative composition which allows for countless sociological and neo-feminist representations. The colouristicly sculptured girl, as a projected vision of a grey- haired woman at a control panel, rises up in a visual code of the El Greco's Count of Orgaz. Glorified and virtuous, embroidered with yellow and blue threads, 'illuminated by the sun and the moon', a compassionate and friendly heroine represents a powerful psychological transposition of feminine fantasies and unfinished life adventures. The Knowledge Shall Save the World is a grotesque warning given by the intellectuals whose isolated lives 'are stricken’ by the information of the art of the digital age. The position of the book titled 'The Art of The Digital Age', which is also the name of the exhibition, is found in a detail whose direct reference can be discovered in baroque fluttering sashes which are carried across the sky by anthropomorphic angels and which always have important messages written on them. Hello! Let Me Introduce You to My Anime is a hermetic composition devided into three sequences of events. The upper third is reserved fot the hidden, unconscious parts of the being, thickly stitched with gold threads and marked by girl-woman like standing figures. The body eroticised by clothes which is represented on a patchwork rug and the transgender figure engaged both in physical and intellectual work, belong to the lower, symbolically earthly spheres. The representation of the dual figure of a wolf, an animal guardian of 'places of primordial events', is a realistic counterpart to sculptures of the lions of Mycenae which have the same task – to protect the mythical feminine deity.

The Outcome of Sewing Desires in

I Wish, I Wish... a Bernina B580 / Mac Pro / 3D Printer also belong to the opus of 'the picturesof wishes'. According to the artist, all of them are inspired by a famous embroidery by the Lady of the Rocks – at the beginning of the 19th century, while waiting for her husband for 25 years to come back from the sea, she sewed the visage of Mother of God in silk, with silver and gold threads, intertwining her own hair into the hair of angels.

The transfer of prayer from the sacred into the wordly sphere, contributed to the emotional overlap of the feminine natures which are distant in time but essentially very close. The prayer is kept as an ancient guarantee of the fulfillment of wishes, even if it is a 3d printer or life-saving knowledge. It became certain that sewing 'your soul's desires' reached the concrete materialization of the art work whih actually is the initial and the final outcome of any work of art. Historically, the deeper and more mystical model can be found in the medieval folklore, in the embroidery of Jefimija at the beginning of the 15th century. Only one aspect allows for comparing the despot's wife's embroidery and that by our artist, and that is writing in the first person, confessional, blunt and direct. With immeasurable differences in the spiritual sense, historical roles and personnal destinies, the post-kosovan widow Rakicevski 'sews in horrid pains of her elegant soul', while Daliborka, hungry for knowledge, artistically announces her current desires and definitely shares the joy of the renowned colleague from New York, Faith Ringgold who shouts 'Hey, I am an artist, I belong to the galleries and have exhibitions!'

The hedonistic colourism, the dislocation of the iconographic solutions and the luxurious intuition, as Goethe says, 'the disclosure of the person's soul' – speak about Daliborka's artistry, her pictures and many talents. To compare her works with the works by the Turner Award laureate, the great Grayson Perry, would perhaps seem far fetched, but, in the context of the ascetic practice and the surreal existence of the artist on the domestic art scene, it is appropriate, meaningful and, with this exhibition, quite substantiating.

Svetlana Jovicic, Art Historian