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Supervisors:
Assistant Professor Barbara Łuczkowiak

Studio of Experimental Fabric

Professor Jarosław Modzelewski

Studio of Painting

Professor Wojciech Zubala

Studio of Drawing

> Dajana Durić

When I create, I focus on my own inner experiences. They are an important element in the development of my pieces. I have always been fascinated by the human inner world. I am interested in philosophic anthropology, psychology, biology and the sociology of emotions. In my view, feelings play an important role in connecting the micro and macro levels of social reality. Through my pieces I wish to present the inner world, a psychologically motivated action. Something understated, graspable only through emotions and personal experience which affects the state of mind. Individual issues are also important to me, and how macro-reality affects micro-reality. In addition to the actual pieces, the space where I place them is also very important. It becomes a part of the entire project. For me, arranging an interior is a creative process. Space and pieces make up a whole. Through space I create my own reality and a personalised place, to which I add a new dimension and meaning.

> Assistant Professor Barbara Łuczkowiak

Dajana Durić began studying in my Studio of Experimental Textile in 2009; she graduated with honours in 2012.Dajana has created homogenous installations, all-white or all-red, poetic and full of anxiety. Specific topography of the space allows the audience to get to know the atmosphere of the artist’s pieces and experiences, and deeply concealed layers of emotions and substance. She wishes the audience not to just passively watch, but to be active, “penetrating”. She forces them to engage in introspection. She tries to show the most important feature of her art, some secret she wants to reveal to the audience. The emotional aspect is also very important, so closely linked to the artist’s life. It is about feelings between people, space and materials. It is about finding harmony and unity with this particular moment in time and space, and actual being there, while a piece belongs to a space, which in turn involves much more than what we can see and understand. It is a kind of a secret which we try to reveal.

> Professor Jarosław Modzelewski

Dajana defended her degree piece with honours. Her piece was a coherent whole, in which a role equally important to the actual paintings themselves was played by the way they were presented in a particular space, and the sound accompanying them. Viewers hear recorded conversations with blind people, interviewed by the author, speaking about their visual associations with the sound they listened to. This was the sound of the sea and the choice was no coincidence. Dajana, who comes from Croatia, in this way sets an emotional attitude that runs right through her degree piece, a simple longing for her beautiful country. Later, while painting interpretations of the colours imagined by the blind people she interviewed, she also recorded – unconsciously perhaps – their longing for the seen world. This indicates that her way of painting is based on two major principles. The first one is discipline of composition, which gives order to the visual realm of her pieces, and the other is a deep sensitivity for sensual perception of colour and sound. The structure of Dajana’s paintings includes the Pythagorean principles organising abstract perfection of the world of music: measure, proportion, rhythm, harmony. Thanks to these qualities, her art goes beyond the two-dimensionality of a painting, expanding its influence into space and time-space perception. However, despite this disciplining language of abstraction, it is emotion that remains the essence of Dajana’s painting.

> Professor Wojciech Zubala

Dajana Durić’s painting degree piece is a complex, multi-stranded and multi-level undertaking, far beyond the confines of painting. Right from the outset the project began to assume the features of research work, with the individuals this research was centred on representing various geographical, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. These people were characterised by different sensitivity and different physical features, significantly affecting their perception of reality – the project’s participants also included blind people. Dajana’s studio became a kind of a lab filled with the sounds of nature and contemporary civilisation, a record of interviews conducted by her and verbal accounts of individual responses as well as interpretation of the sounds presented. The sum of these experiences has formed a painting and sound installation, carefully inscribed into the gallery space which has become an integral part of the degree piece.
The author, through the combination of different media necessary for full transfer of the content, requires the audience to actively participate in reception of her piece. The project reveals Dajana’s artistic sensitivity, not only to the world, but above all to other people. Humans experience reality through all the senses, but the Platonic theory of cognition suggests that senses alone are not sufficient to get to know it fully. In addition to seeing, hearing and touching, thought has to collaborate with our senses. Dajana Durić’s degree piece, in addition to personal strands, is an image of other people’s thoughts, it presents multiplicity and diversity of interpretations of the same reality, and proves how great and immense human sensitivity is.