"Striving for the purity of the ineffable or rather, for the transcendent, I am guided by irrational forces and intuition, myths, dreams and mystery, in order to build an endless labyrinth in which even I may get lost. My art practice feels like a perennial exploration of the inner universe."
Nikola Gocic (born in Nis, 1980) is an architect by profession and a film reviewer, collage artist and film festival curator by passion. He has frequently and successfully collaborated on film-related articles with Rouzbeh Rashidi – the Iranian-Irish filmmaker and founder of the Dublin-based company Experimental Film Society, with five of his essays published in the book Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society (Dublin, 2020).
As a collage artist, Gocic has created numerous promotional images for NYC-based underground artist Martin Del Carpio. For Hungarian avant-garde filmmaker Péter Lichter, he designed the poster for a found-footage feature, Empty Horses, which was shown at the 2020 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. He has also worked alongside German composer and film director Martin Gerigk on his animated shorts Otonashi (2021), Once I Passed (2022) and Demi-Gods (2022), which have been screened on more than 100 festivals around the globe. Their fourth collaborative effort, Demi-Goddesses, released in 2023.
Four of his solo exhibitions were presented in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, and by the end of 2019, he co-curated the inaugural edition of the International festival of analog experimental cinema Kinoskop in Belgrade, where some of his collages were shown at the closing ceremony. Two of his short comics; ‘Exhausted Peace’ and ‘F Mode’ were exhibited at the Belgrade International Comics Festival in 2018 and 2019. His collage ‘Ultrafantasia: The Spirits Gathering’ was selected as one of the 10 finalists for the Artbox.Project Venezia 1.0 exhibition held in Tana Art Space, Venice, during May of 2022. Following were two group exhibitions – Kaos, international festival of modern collage in Slovenia, and ‘Collage 2022’ at John B. Aird Gallery (online) based in Canada. As a semi-finalist, his 2023 piece ‘The Axis of Imagination’ was a part of Artbox.Project New York 2.0 exhibition (April 17-26, 2023).
