Darko Babic

Darko Babic was born in 1969 in Uzice. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 2000, Painting department, in the class of Professor Momcilo Antonovic. He took part in many group exhibitions and had two solo ones. After the basic studies, he enrolled in master studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade.

At the very beginning of his career he found out he suffered from multiple sclerosis. He returned from Belgrade to Pozega, the place where he had grown up. At first, he didn’t want to accept the diagnosis about his disease and rejected to take medicine or even doctor’s advice. With the course of time, his body gradually refused to listen, getting weaker and weaker each day. He began feeling tired more easily than he used to and the distance he could walk without a rest was getting shorter day by day. This moment marked the beginning of a gradual self-isolation. Darko stopped being creative, giving himself up to the habits which made him completely passive.

After 10 years of isolation, Darko received an invitation from his friend employed by Pozega Art Gallery to exhibit his works which made him be creative again and step out into the light. When the artist accepted the invitation, a 10-month long period of preparing the exhibition started as well as a period of self-struggle with his own passivity, established habits and personal boundaries.

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Children from the Polio, Cerebral Palsy and Plegia Association in Pozega (Association of people with disabilities)

Andrijana Lucic, Borko Pavlovic, Ivan Stefanovic, Marko Mihajlovic, Sara Milcanovic, Stefan Micovic, Uros Matijevic and Zoran Petrovic are the children who daily meet on the association premises spending time together, socializing or completing school assignments.

Every now and then some creative workshops are organized for these children. Within art workshops and in cooperation with Darko, they were given an  opportunity to learn drawing and painting, but in the first place how to express themselves and how to communicate by means of art. The relatioship between Darko and the children changed throughout this months-long period.

At the beginning, Darko was mainly their teacher. Gradually, a warm air of friendship started dominating their interaction. And in the end, a partnership between Darko and the children was established with both sides equal in this creative process of preparing the exhibition.

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Sladjana Petrovic Varagic

Sladjana Petrovic Varagic is an art historian who was previously employed as an art gallery manager and today she is the director of the Cultural Centre of Pozega, within which the art gallery presents the works of contemporary visual arts. With her work, Sladjana peristently tend to decentralize Serbian art scene and also establish the local scene of visual arts in Pozega. She met the artist Darko Babic through her work and later became friends with him. Their friendship grew stronger as time went by.