* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Danai Gkoni is an architect and digital artist. She has lived, studied and worked in Greece and the Netherlands. Since 2013 she has been exploring a particular style of digital illustration by narrating surreal and sometimes dystopic urban stories.
Danai explains the work by saying, “I’d like to think that my work has a pessimistic political reference- I started working with collage in 2012, on a period that Greece was deeply affected by the economic crisis, which strongly reflected on the society- therefore on the image of the city of Athens. ‘There is no longer outside’,the title of my first piece, was an effort to depict capitalism as the dystopia of an infinite interior. Since then I continued exploring digital collage: the cities I lived in are constant inspirations as spatial and social conditions – my images are dystopic and entertaining at the same time. Coming from the field of architecture I’m deeply interested in the dynamics of space and the built environment, the urban lifestyle and its aesthetics, the pleasure of urbanity as a space of togetherness and isolation at the same time- those are the concepts I try to explore as a digital artist.”
