Damir Očko

For You to Live for You to Die
2008
sound installation (sound recording, 5’’, played from the exterior walls of the venue once per day at 11.55 h)

During his exile years in New York, shortly before his death, the Viennese composer Gustav Mahler finished a draft for his Symphony No.10. The symphony remained unfinished but a number of written interventions and instructions can be found in the ghost score that he left. One story is particularly interesting. He describes a funeral march for a chief fireman that was happening under his hotel room window. The rhythm of the march was marked by horrible strokes of the bas drums but what was interesting was that these strokes where set up in the intervals between almost 40 seconds of silence.
Mahler described this as the most terrifying effect that sound can produce. Each stroke is strong as a bomb, but each of them comes as a total surprise, enabling you to relax or adjust; you are disturbed with each stroke as if you have experienced it for the first time. Among the many notes written in the score there is one particular, referring to the absolute – in the last section of the unfinished work, he has written: “for you to live for you to die”. The in-between absence of everything, which separates the drum strokes, becomes a space of expectation, expectation of the forthcoming events and changes, marked each day at five minutes to twelve.

Damir Očko (1977, Zagreb, HR) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. His recent solo exhibitions were, among others at Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb; Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art and Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent group exhibitions include the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden; International Triennial of Contemporary Art, National Gallery, Prague; Municipal Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia; Lothringer13 - Städtische Kunsthalle Munich, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham. His video works have recently been screened at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. He has been granted residency fellowships from the Helsinki International Artist-in-Residence Programme (HIAP), Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art, KulturKontakt Vienna and the Akademie Schloss Solitude. He is based in Stuttgart and Zagreb.