Dañila Kostil (1984) was born in the USSR, Tashkent, raised and educated in Hungary. After studying at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Dañila worked as a film director in short format, directing short films, music videos and commercials worldwide for 15 years. Photography was present throughout his whole life and film career.
‘I always had a photo camera with me, and even though most of my filming work is with crew and actors, I barely take photos of people. Different patterns catched my attention all the time as I saw on the scans from the past 10 years. Plenty of shots of electricity cables from different countries and years, photos of waves, macro shots of weird textures, photos of empty billboards from multiple parts of the world. I was making them without any intention to make a series, a book or an exhibition. I was driven by the thought of wu wei, creating by simply keeping on existing, by following the flow.’
Pattern Recognition project was born around 2018, when Dañila started to rescan and organise all his old and new photos. Organising and cataloguing the images became a ritual and part of his artistic process.
‘What keeps me going is moving towards multimedia by stitching the scans into motion pictures, creating sequences of my photography in order to make the meta-patterns recognisable for others.’
Dañila’s work method of work has 3 phases:
X: The Stimulus: The ‘recognition’, shooting the photos, the raw materials of the project. This phase is completely based on visual intuition and sensitivity. Ideally there is no intentional or planned artistic activity in the moment of exposure.
Y: The Discipline: After the ‘recognition’, Dañila carefully archives and catalogues the material and prepares it for the third phase.
Z: The Pattern Recognition: This phase is conscious. By selecting images, pairing them, making series and sequences the pieces become conceptual mixed media projects exploring simple questions such as: ‘Why are we attracted to patterns? Are we trying to predict something by recognising patterns in our life?’
‘For me it’s an endless journey, the more patterns I explore in my life, the deeper and more universal my meta-approach to the relationship of art and spirituality becomes. For me visual and meta-patterns are representing life itself, a global good in a spiritual, scientific and artistic way. All my images were born of light, as a projection of sacred geometry, very similar to fractals. Since all is based on a completely analogue process, the details of every single photo are endless, they are patterns within patterns. It’s all made of grain, darkened silver particles on paper.
Budapest, 2022.01.08.
