ABOUT THE SERIES

Tell Me What You See, And I’ll Tell You Who You Are

When in 1921, after experimenting with a children’s
game, Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach published a study into his famous
psychological test, he lastingly impacted our understanding of seeing and
perceiving images. The test was developed with the purpose of establishing
a psychodiagnosis based on a subject’s perceptions of ten inkblot images.
By looking at the images, a patient supposedly projects their secret desires,
complexes and conflicts into the visual stimuli generated by the inkblots while
partly revealing their personality through their perceptions. This is due to
the test having no “correct” and “wrong” answers – it was created to reveal our
subconscious mind behind a barricade of conscious responses.

Rorschach’s method definitively confirmed that
different people perceive the same images differently – reality as an objective
fact does not exist, but varies from person to person. How we perceive and
understand images depends on our way of thinking; the viewer interprets meaning
through their language codes and levels of understanding, education, cultural
and historical determinism, and many other factors. The test draws
attention to a fact as relevant in art as in psychoanalysis – that reality
and its interpretation are not stable, invariable constants.

DK is an artist who, in his long photographic career,
has devoted many of his works to the concept of the gaze in photography; Most
recently, he has explored this motif in Scotoma, a series presented
at the Jakopič Gallery after years in the making. The works in this series
focus on the premise that viewers help shape reality with their perception of
it. He shot dreamscapes in the immediate vicinity of his Ljubljana studio, but
named them after distant places by means of visual associations. This
inevitably raised the question of whether the background to a photograph’s
conception actually matters if a viewer sees something completely different in
it. The experience of years-long experimentation with the concept of looking
led to the extrapolation of the theme into a new photographic direction,
presented in Cankarjev dom’s Small Gallery for the first time.

In a series of works titled Remnants, works
that according to the artist constitute only an introduction to the process, DK
investigates, in an almost psychoanalytic way, what gives the image value and
how viewers engage with visual imagery. In DK’s words: “In Remnants,
I’m examining what qualifies as an image. Can some meaning-carrying image,
perhaps even beauty, be found in the discarded remnants of something that
was once intended as an image carrier? Consequently, I am re-examining whether
it is possible to find meaning, and perhaps even the beauty of living, in our
contemporary moment, marked by disintegration of values, a collapse of systems
and subsystems, i.e., the bearers of what we used to call humanity, human
society.”

DK most often seeks meaning in the marginal and the
overlooked rather than in a veristic representation of the visible and
concrete. In his latest project, he reused remnants of old photographic films,
with which the artist re-evaluated his body of work created in the 1980s, at
the very beginning of his photographic career.

In a multitude of old pictures, some of them
discarded, damaged or poorly preserved, he began to notice a series of
fascinating “flaws” – photochemical damage, notches, scratches, unusual cutouts
and more. But it was precisely these discards that became the carriers of
meaning – because they were still images of something even if created only as a
by-product of what was originally in the foreground. When the artist places the
representational focus on the “flaws”, they start to unfold before us in a
multitude of possible interpretations, from animal contours, anthropomorphic
figures, ghosts and monsters to the mysterious vastness of the universe. The
artist systematically recreated such motifs in his studio with the
intention of exploring the concepts of the erroneous and random in the creative
process. In the series, DK is once again experimenting with the concepts of
fiction and creation of meaning, while challenging the viewers to find their
own truth in each image.

Of all the artistic means of expression, photography
is considered to be the medium that records reality most objectively, or is
even inherently truthful. But for DK, photography has never equalled a
representation of reality. He is interested in the communication between the
image and the viewer, and the semantic field established in the viewing
process. The question for the artist is not what a photograph says about
reality, but what it says about its author, or, better yet, what it says about
us. His photographic images function as a sort of Rorschach test – their fluid
forms hovering between abstraction and concreteness, offering endless ways
of understanding, and inviting the viewer to try and decipher them. DK
re-emphasizes the fact that art is more than simply a representation of images,
but an opportunity to contemplate and understand oneself, to undertake a
journey toward the inner self and confront imagery that art can conjure up deep
from the subconscious.

Hana Čeferin

DK graduated from FPS in Munich and obtained his
master’s degree from IVAS in Cologne. He has been member of the Strip Core art
collective for over thirty years. He lived and worked between Ljubljana,
Cologne, Munich, Vienna and Belgrade for a number of years.

His creative process is based on artistic research,
which results in an in-depth visual representation of themes often touching on
socio-political and social issues. Recently, his research has also revealed a
wide spectrum of dilemmas facing the photographic medium. From the
subject/object relationship to the questions of the perception horizon and
research into the truth/image, real/virtual, and authentic/false relationships.
With an original visual and conceptual approach to photography, the remarkable
body of work encourages awareness of actual reality through
visual narrative, not through immediate effect, however, but touching the
viewer on a more sublime level, yet with a far-reaching impact.

His work has been presented internationally and
published in several publications and two monographs. DK’s works form part of
private and museum collections in Slovenia and across the world.