Danica Dakic, Sretno (Good Luck), 2013.

 

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

Danica Dakic: Three Places

October 26, 2013 – January 26, 2014

Curator: Dana Turkovic, Curator of Exhibitions

Trained as a painter, Danica Dakić often relies on formal techniques used in historical painting in her photographic and video works. Dakić’s installations are elegant meditations on place and how it affects its residents through role playing and performance. Her works are drawn from and inspired by collaborations with her protagonists of interest or performers set in highly wrought scenes and documented through a variety of media as they play out their own narratives. Originally from Bosnia and splitting her time between Sarajevo and Dusseldorf, Dakić has been invited to work with St. Louis’s 70,000 Bosnian populations during 2013 and will show the collaboration in a series of works to be shown in Laumeier’s galleries.

Danica Dakić was born in Sarajevo in 1962, and now lives and works in both Düsseldorf and Sarajevo. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo (1981-85); the University of Arts, Belgrade (1985-88); and the Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf (1988-90). Her work deals with issues of language and identity, and also comments on the conflict between individual and collective experience. Dakić has exhibited at the Gandy Gallery, Bratislava; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. She has also participated in the 6th International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Curitiba in 2011, the Liverpool Biennial in 2010, and the 17th Bienniale of Sydney in 2010. She received first award for her video installation, “Wall” at the SCCA – Sarajevo Second Annual Exhibition.

This exhibition is generously supported by St. Louis County Parks, the Regional Arts Commission, Missouri Arts Council
and the Arts & Education Council.

 

WINTER RECESS

February – April 2014

Check back for performances and events happening at Laumeier during Winter Recess

 

Mound City

April – September 2014

Curators: Marilu Knode and Dana Turkovic

The title Mound City is St. Louis’s appellation in honor of the Mound culture that existed here a thousand years ago. The heart of this Mississippian culture’s capital, located at Cahokia, adjacent to East St. Louis on the Illinois border, is where the bulk of the remaining mounds are found. This ancient city was the largest north of Mexico City, and like Hohokam in the southwest, the Mound builders dispersed (or disappeared) around 1400 CE. Although archaeology on the site continues to yield astonishing, and controversial, findings (such as evidence of human sacrifice), the presence of this early civilization is little felt in the surrounding area. Indeed, while the nation recently celebrated Lewis & Clark’s historic voyage to find an uninterrupted water route to the West coast, the specifics of St. Louis’s role in taming of the West is little examined.

St. Louis does celebrate its position as the “heart” of the country, ignoring its less palatable history—its erasure of its native past supplanted by European settlements, its current racial problems, a convoluted political system that precludes collaboration and resource sharing, a declining industrial base and environmental problems. It is this uncelebrated set of realities that we hope will be a rich vein for artistic exploration. Through Mound City, and other educational and curatorial initiatives, we intend to explore the interrelationship between art, history and nature in our 105 acres and historic gallery spaces.