“Art is a special form of knowledge – subjective, sensory, not scientific. It is not better than other forms of knowledge, but it is unique. … To gain access to these ultimate and unique realities, we have artists, whose aesthetic activities – that is, activities related to the senses – capture unicities and allow us to know true reality.”
Augusto Boal writes about the role of the artist in “Aesthetics of the Oppressed” in words that resonate with our vision. The artist—with a capital A—is as a person who “penetrates the unicity of the being,” in order to search for “his or her Identity in Alterity” —That kind of artist transgresses the idea of the collective, imposed, identities to explore otherness and the state of being unique, transforming the curtain of the divide between self and otherness, into an artwork of and for understanding.
We, at Živi Atelje DK (Living Atelier DK), want to stimulate and enable connections between artists and the public with the Real. We also seek to promote art as an educational and therapeutic tool and mode for activism. Experiment, exchange, cooperation and discussion are methods we favor to enable this.
Our spaces—the atelier, the gallery and club—as much as our projects, including the Artist in Residence program, will be the platform for these explorations.
Identity, relation towards otherness, memory, peace-building, ecology and equality (including gender, social, ethnic, racial, and spiritual) are part the issues whose exploration we encourage through art.
Our vision is to build on what Vera Dajht Kralj created in her life: connecting worlds through art. Živi Atelje DK is a meeting ground, an environment, for unleashing the creative potential of the artist, or research in related fields, and for exchange with the public.
Again, Boal, “Loving is Art, and Art is Love. These two processes—loving, and perceiving aesthetically the unicity of the Other, whether living Being or Thing—are absolutely identical.”
Our vision is to turn this thought into practice. For us, unicity is the oneness of the individual, to reach the so-called Other to transgress and transform the boundaries.
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