Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice explores the rituals we invent to survive emotional uncertainty. Working across automata, installation, sound, sculpture, and interactive systems, I create environments where repetitive gestures reveal the fragile mechanisms of attachment, loss, intimacy, and hope.
I am drawn to the point where the mechanical becomes deeply human. A hand reaches endlessly for a ring without ever grasping it. A heart continues to beat in darkness. A disembodied voice answers every call with empathy, although no human is present. These actions never resolve, yet they persist. Their repetition reflects our own instinct to repair, to reconnect, and to keep believing despite uncertainty.
Fragile materials—including crumpled kraft paper, plaster, textiles, found objects, and light—carry the traces of memory and lived experience. Combined with motors, artificial intelligence, and sound, they create works that oscillate between vulnerability and technology, presence and absence, reality and projection.
My installations do not tell stories with fixed meanings. Instead, they invite viewers to inhabit spaces where personal memories and emotions can be projected onto objects and gestures. I am interested in how we attribute life to what is inanimate, how we seek comfort in repetition, and how emotional bonds can emerge with both people and machines.
Ultimately, my work considers repetition not as failure or obsession, but as a quiet act of resilience: a way of enduring, repairing, and remaining open to connection in an increasingly uncertain world.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daniela Markovic is a French artist based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Research from Paris 1, Sorbonne School of Arts, with a thesis titled Automata, Repetition and Emotional Projection. Her practice moves between automata, interactive systems, sound and installation, exploring the rituals, both bodily and mechanical, that humans develop to make sense of emotional uncertainty: loss, intimacy, connection, and the quiet persistence of life itself. In her installations, body fragments, mechanical gestures and intimate materials are held in a state of suspension. A hand repeats a gesture that never resolves. A heart continues to beat. A voice responds without being human. Repetition becomes a form of resistance, not a choice, but an instinct, a ritual, the body’s quiet refusal to disappear.
This attention to gesture, surface and repetition was already present in her earlier work as a painter. In Roi de nos lacs, the surface of Lake Geneva is built up in thick, layered strokes, scratched and rubbed back until light and water seem to move again beneath the paint. In A fleur de peau, portraits of women from Geneva’s red light district are rendered on damaged, crumpled kraft paper, carrying the marks of the lives they hold.
Across mediums, Daniela Markovic’s work inhabits liminal spaces where technology, material and gesture become vessels for memory, longing, repair and projection.
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