Domen Dimovski - Cities Between Worlds

Domen Dimovski (1995, Kranj) is a visual artist working in the fields of digital graphics, animation, video, and painting. After completing his secondary education at the Secondary School of Design and Photography in Ljubljana, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Department of Painting, where he graduated in 2017 with a focus on Video and New Media. In 2019, he completed his master’s degree at the same faculty with the animated film Sand Passage. He has participated in numerous film festivals and has held 16 solo and 95 group exhibitions. He has received several awards for his work, most recently the DigitalBigScreen 360° award at the Speculum Artium Festival in 2023. He is a member of the Slovenian Association of Fine Artists (ZDSLU) and the Association of Visual Artists of Ljubljana (LDK) and works as a self-employed artist. His work explores unnoticed tensions of contemporary times and the atmosphere of a world in transition.

Domen Dimovski is an artist from a younger generation, working with various artistic approaches – from traditional painting techniques to digital graphics and video. The exhibition Cities Between Worlds represents his exploration and development of visual expression through digital graphics, which seem to be the closest to the theme that Dimovski is addressing: the theme of abandoned cities, a future without human existence, a future that we can imagine through already existing cities or parts of cities that are becoming increasingly tempting subjects for photographers. The latter focus on forgotten spaces, where objects remind us of the presence of humans once (or where nature is slowly reclaiming these spaces), evoking nostalgia for the past, and bringing the truth of impermanence into life and before our eyes. These voids serve as a universal nexus from which ideas and feelings of an intangible or even unreal time emerge.

The view into a space where we sense the simultaneous presence and absence of humans—presence as the moment of loss, and absence as the seen reality. The presence is merely an illusion, while the existing state before us is the one that opens the dusty memory book of past moments. Everything happens in a state of non-movement, frozen in time. The structure bears the mark of humanity—both that of the builder and the inhabitant. A building, a space, is essentially the story of a symbiotic relationship between humans and their surroundings, but in these abandoned voids, this relationship is broken, only hinting at one side the story of the past, and on the other, the story where the past, present, and future intersect.

Dimovski’s cities are derived from the mentioned “voids” that today govern many parts of the world, but at the same time, alongside the abandoned, we continue to build new structures into infinity. It seems that we cannot escape or stop the growing construction sprawl, and as a result, we slowly lose natural spaces—spaces meant for humanity, which is becoming increasingly indifferent to nature. Dimovski is keenly aware of this issue, and through his work, which primarily addresses the theme of space, he comments on and interprets human blindness, the inability to see beyond the present moment into the future.

Dimovski’s cities are designed as endless fields of high-rise buildings, where we are captivated by their unique aesthetic, but which at the same time carry a message of the extinction of the living. They act as the backdrop to a utopian city that, for some unknown reason, has lost the one who would inhabit it and bring it to life. These cities are a blend of the real and the imaginary, and without traces of humans and nature, they speak of the present time, of humanity’s absence from itself. Partially ruined, they provocatively allude to the daily news that we, almost indifferently, follow online. Perhaps, alongside the aesthetics and harmonious rhythms into which Dimovski places the skyscrapers of these cities, we will still feel the author’s call for reflection on the primordial – on nature, fellow humans, and time.