Damir Očko "Studies on Shivering: The Third Degree"

In The Third Degree, one can see a close-up footage of skin scars resulting from third degree burns, surrounded by microtonal sound of a crystal-clear note.

If the two films - The Third Degree and TK - constitute the basis of the project, the display held in Palazzo Pisani S. Marina further develops their issues while expanding in the space through other material.

The exhibition tends to expose an apparent state of tranquility and its underlying violence, and therefore echoes a form of violence brought by the instability between stillness and a lurking pressure. 

In this room is presented an ensemble of 16 drawings made by one of the main protagonists of the film TK, an old man suffering from Parkinson's disease. Each of these drawings reads the beginning of a sentence from a poem written by Damir Očko starting with the words "In Tranquility..."

Analyzing and staging the outline of codependence between the artist, the audience and the exhibition, Damir Očko involves the viewers so they could become aware of their role within the artistic process. For if the context informs, it also transforms by making semantic shifts and by showing internal structures of artmaking in order to create a new kind of rhetoric—a mechanism that reinforces our position as both witnesses and actors of today’s complex world.

TK (2014) brings the interest for the language of body and its relation to the socio political context of “physical presence”. The title of the work, TK, is an onomatopoeic description of the sound made either by stone hitting the ground or by teeth closing in bite. 

Acting as an extension—or a reader—of the exhibition, a reversed interview has been conducted by the artist with the curator Marc Bembekoff. Here, Damir Očko has striven to deconstruct the conventional process that constitutes the genre, in shifting the traditional roles of the interviewer and the interviewee. By reversing the way questions are usually asked, this upside down questionnaire not only pushes the borders and melts answers and questions, but it also reflects the way in which the entire project has been conceived. While following a circling scheme, this reversed interview reveals more about the artist’s modus operandi as much as his thoughts and views, a reflection determined at the same time by social, political and aesthetic parameters.