Barbara Kacic Daillant

I am a French-Croatian multidisciplinary artist working with painting, etching, and photography.

My practice is divided between two approaches. In my painting and etching work, I explore mental illness through surreal and often body-based imagery. I use elements of body horror and transformation to express internal psychological states that are difficult to describe in direct terms. These works focus on the instability of the body and the mind, and how distress can change how we see ourselves.

In contrast, my photography is outward-facing. It documents what I want to see in the world: solidarity, collective action, and justice. I mainly work with documentary photography, focusing on protests and public gatherings across Europe. These images reflect moments of resistance and people coming together in shared purpose.

Across all mediums, I am interested in how internal experience and external reality affect one another, and how images can hold both personal and political meaning.

This series of paintings and etchings is inspired by the oceanic environment, drawing a parallel between women and sharks. The shark is commonly constructed as an apex predator: ruthless, efficient, and dangerous. Yet it is also deeply vulnerable within systems of human extraction. It is hunted for trophies, fins, and products associated with status, profit, and even aphrodisiac myths. Its image is repeatedly reduced to violence: an open mouth, teeth, and the act of tearing into prey.

This narrow framing raises a question: what would it mean if humans were always represented through acts of consumption or acts of terror? Would it justify enduring mutilation and capture? The work responds by transposing elements of shark biology onto the human body, unsettling the boundary between predator and prey, and complicating who is permitted to embody violence.

Gills, a third eyelid, and a gaping shark jaw emerge within human anatomy, interrupting and reconfiguring the body. Naval mines transform into a face that appears to choke on the very object it is becoming. A hammerhead shark floats alongside a woman in a dense black mass, while suspended shark tails echo the presence of human legs. In one image, a self-portrait binds my body to a shark, collapsing distance between subject and animal.

Across the series, I am interested in shared victimhood as well as transformation: particularly the space of body horror and metamorphosis. These hybrid forms suggest an unwanted and irreversible change, where the body becomes both site and evidence of external forces. The works hover between empathy and unease, questioning how violence is assigned, represented, and internalised across species and gendered bodies.

Apex Predator

Documentary Photography