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Damir Ocko

The Third Degree

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 10:30 | Croatie | 2015

The Third Degree is a single scene film exploring a close-ups of skin scars resulting from third degree burns filmed through an installation of broken mirrors reflecting the crew and the whole background process while filming the scars, thus integrating the subject of the camera with the process of filming itself. The Third Degree was made as a response to questions that emerged due the particularly violent way the previous film TK was filmed. The term "Third Degree" has an ambiguous meaning in the English language: it is a way to classify a burn of a very strong degree, but it can also signify a process of extorting a confession under violence. Set in motion by such violent interpretations and perspectives, film tries to critically, yet poetically, cut through the collective haze that blurs relations between means of production, control and the subject itself, giving rise to alternative methods of understanding as a reflection determined at the same time by social, political and aesthetic parameters.

Damir Očko was born in 1977 in Zagreb, where he lives and works. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Očko has exhibited on solo exhibitions at DAZIBAO, Montreal, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien in Graz and Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in Dublin among other places. He participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally with institutions such as, MUDAM in Luxembourg, FRAC le Plateau, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany, Kunsthalle Vienna, among others. His works can be found in the collections of Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation and CNAP – Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris or at the MUDAM in Luxembourg. Damir Očko was representing Croatia in the 56th Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition "Studies on Shivering / The Third Degree.