galleria tiziana di caro
Menu
galleria tiziana di caro
Dear Tiziana
from 26/03/2022 to 10/06/2022

Dear Tiziana,
three years ago, we spoke about how we wanted to celebrate dressed in sequin dresses and make a fabulous drag performance while we build an exhibition for my new body of work. The show was to be about the ways we celebrate love and hope and about a “chosen family”, the term so well known to every queer person that felt a rejection of some sort.

While obviously many things have changed since, and the world just spins in distress, one crisis after another, I am still just a humble Drag Queen with an iridescent glitter crust stuck in the corner of my eye that marks everything I look at these days with glamorous scars.

This flicker of mine, between glitter and dirt, I find to be a place of hope and rebellion.

In that regard, I am sending you a few of my new collages. I refer to them as DragForms. You know that the 2020 Zagreb earthquake damaged my studio in an old part of the city and how seeing my deeply wounded studio felt shattering. All the fragments of different aspects of my life scattered among the dust and glitter. The wall of a room I kept my Drag tucked away collapsed, and all my hidden treasures, my wigs, dresses, makeup went everywhere.

DragForms I am sending you are of this dust and glitter, and I wish they will transcribe the sense of hope and joy they were to me while I was slowly healing the studio and myself from ruptured walls and occasional despair. These little birds and mundane objects in them each deconstruct a specific fear described in a vast catalogue of human phobias.

I’ve also packed some cocktails for you. They are sort of small sculptural forms, to be held in hands. Made of materials worn by Drag Queens, such as makeup, but also dirt, dust and crystallised mysterious objects and various tokens of sisterhood. Yet they are nothing heavy, nothing big, nothing monumental. Just something to hold in hand, like a precious friend.

In one of the boxes, there is also a bag of fabulous dirt I collected from a studio floor after one of my drag parties. A leftover from a night of dancing. What greater way of rebelling there is, than to be a 44 years old man dressed in pink mini, cutting through doll shaped cake, dancing all night.
 
Dear Tiziana, what is it we celebrate if not holding hands, having drinks and hoping for the future where we will be opening the circle to others and to imagine this crystallised gathering that saves the world with precious gestures.

Cheers
Damir
 
p.s.
The knife is in one of the cocktails


---


The solo exhibition by Damir Ocko, entitled Dear Tiziana and drafted together with Matteo Lucchetti, opens on Saturday, 26 March, 2022
6-9:30 pm at Galleria Tiziana Di Caro in piazzetta Nilo, 7 – 80134 Napoli.

For further informations you can dial +39 (0)81 5525526, or write an e-mail here: info@tizianadicaro.it

The gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 2pm – 6pm and the exhibition will close, Saturday, 28 May, 2022