The many transformations, cycles, and layers of Dunja Janković

Through the 2010s, Dunja Janković churned out dizzying, confounding and increasingly abstract comics, and co-organised comics festivals in the US as well as her native Croatia, before she turned her creative focus to other art media like art installation and screen printing.

Talking to Allan Haverholm in 2020, however, it becomes clear that comics never really lost their grip on her. Hear about her nomadic life and practice (even during a pandemic!), the allures of abstraction and the need for immediacy in this episode of the Uncomics podcast!

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Credits

The Uncomics podcast is edited and produced by Allan Haverholm. Music by Allan Grønvall Pedersen. All content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

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The galleries below only cover the works discussed in this artist talk. You are strongly encouraged to visit Dunja’s website, where you can browse and buy her works. You should also look up her several Tumblrs (here is one, and another, and another), as well as her Flickr and Instagram accounts.

Works discussed

Department of art (2008) and Habitat (2011)

Circles cycles circuits (2011)

As far as the eye can see (2018)

Things that block the view (2020)

Comics haiku (c. 2014)

Public art

Richter’s game (2018)

Commisioned by the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art

Further reading

• The Projects, an artist-centered alternative comics festival started in Portland, OR by Dunja Jankovic, and the people behind the Floating World Comics shop
• Škver, the festival Dunja organised on her home island of Losin
• Simultaneous narrative, see
  • S Ufumwen Ebeigbe, “A Practical Assessment of the Modes of Visual Narratives in the Art of Benin in Nigeria” in Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an international journal, Vol 2, No 1 (2015)
  • R Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives (2010)
• “Abstract comics melt in the air when narrative walks in—and vice versa”, quoted from J Baetens, “Abstraction in Comics”, in SubStance, 40(1), pp. 94–113.
• B Beaty, Comics vs art
• Brenna Murphy, internet artist