Danica Dakić
Danica Dakić (born 1962 in Sarajevo) is a Bosnian artist and university professor. She mainly works with video art, installations, and photography. Her work has been shown widely, including at documenta 12 in 2007 and at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, where she represented Bosnia and Herzegovina. She lives and works in Düsseldorf, Weimar, and Sarajevo.
Dakić studied at the Sarajevo Academy of Arts (1981–1985) and then at the University of Arts in Belgrade, earning a master’s degree in painting in 1988. She moved to Germany in 1988 and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1988–1990) in Nam June Paik’s class. She spent the Bosnian War in Germany and returned to Sarajevo in 1997.
Her practice covers many media, including drawing, photography, video, sound, film, performances, and sculpture. She uses performative and participatory methods to explore changing social, political, and cultural contexts, often including personal elements and utopian ideas. She collaborates long-term with photographer Egbert Trogemann, composer Bojan Vuletić, and producer Amra Bakšić Čamo. Her projects involve deep research and collaboration with the people involved.
Starting from architecture, historical places, or art images, she creates stages with participants where new images and stories emerge beyond familiar classifications. The Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo deeply shaped her work. Since 1997, with the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), she has created pieces in Sarajevo’s urban spaces that reflect post-war upheavals and language development. Examples include MADAME X (1997), a video projection in a Sarajevo alley showing her speaking mouth without sound, and WITNESS (1998), a video and sound piece on the empty pedestal of Ivo Andrić’s monument to question how history is rewritten during upheaval.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:27 (CET).