KUNSTHALLE seitenlichtsaal
Damir Očko– On Ulterior Scale
10.9. – 9.10.2011

Damir Očko, born in Zagreb in 1977, calls his series of most recently produced drawings On Ulterior Scale — works in white and grey pastel applied to paper and replete with partially cut out, partially pasted elements, sentence fragments, and lines of musical notation. The drawings relate to the work of French surrealist René Daumal (1908–1944), whose essay collection The Powers of the Word is the source of the title’s epigraph. Music and literature frequently serve as Očko’s point of departure for his films, drawings, artist’s books, and installations.

The exhibition also includes Očko’s film The Moon Shall Never Take My Voice, subtitled Three songs for a muted voice and various sounds. On an empty, sparsely lit stage, a female performer declaims texts in expressive sign language, the sense of which can initially only be surmised. Her gestures are accompanied by sounds precisely attuned to her, produced by unusual ways of playing instruments — such as stroking piano strings with the fingernails or the toneless breathing of an accordion played with an open valve. The film draws on three verses: a memory of Gustav Mahler’s of a burial ceremony, John Cage’s famous experience in a soundproof room at Harvard, and partially real, partially fictitious sections from interviews with Neil Armstrong about his experiences on the moon. Silence is the continuous theme running through all three episodes: as a gap within the outside world, as a utopian place unattainable for the physical conditions of human existence.

Please find here the catalogue of the exhibition.