UNKnowN x Creative Journeys - Ard Doko

Polina Nosova: It is said that you are inspired by the urban landscape, specifically the people that live in these urban areas. Can you talk a little bit about this inspiration? 

_{Ard Doko: I think that people in general inspire me; people that I’ve met. As I get older, I seem to have more stories and interactions with people, and they always seem to kind of stick with me. The work I make is, in a way, more of a tribute/diary entry. When I was younger, I definitely had a certain environment that wasn’t fairly standard, and I think a lot of the stories from that time are evolving into art pieces. So, it’s more of just, my life story, the people I meet and their stories too.}

PN: Do you usually tell people that you’re gonna do an artwork about them? Or do you just do it? 

_{AD: To be honest, I usually just do it because I don’t want to feel any pressure. But I only implement the stories and certain details in my work, so it’s not like their likeness or anything is in there. I always wanted to write about people and culture, so most of the time I’ll have a conversation with the person and sometimes I’ll record it without people knowing so I can use the conversation later.} 

PN: From the works that I’ve seen, the focal point of the piece tends to be the face. Has it always been this way, or was it more of a gradual process? What does the face entail?

_{AD: I first started with graffiti, so just lettering. But two major things that made me not want to do graffiti that much was that first, I was terrible at lettering, and to not write proper lettering as a graffiti artist felt crappy. And second, I always got bored with doing the same thing over again, like writing the same letters. So afterwards, I did more installation work, and I still like to do that, and that was more inspired. There was also a lot of figurative art going on, but also some abstract elements. And I guess a lot of people know me and like me from the portraits, but to be honest, I also do abstract work. I do a lot of different things, actually. But yeah, people are quicker to recognize the faces as my art than the abstract work.}

PN: What kind of abstract work do you do? 

_{AD: It’s more of a derivative of my portraiture with its heavy use of black. So, with my abstract work, it’s usually a bright colored background with one color, and then just this force of nature black spray paint and ink. It’s more of an expressive kind of abstract work.}

PN: What is the idea behind the colored stripe on the eyes of your portraits?

_{AD: I always think that the way people look at each other and their eyes can say a lot about certain things, and I wanted to emphasize that in the portraiture. And that kind of evolved in saying, okay, maybe people feel dimmed down by how life is going, but there’s still life in the eyes. That’s just one of the things that I was thinking about. And other people would link it to Islam, for example, because they would see it as a veil. I think everyone can interpret it in their own way. You know, it’s not something that necessarily has high political meaning or anything. I just wanted to emphasize on the eyes and I’ve been doing that now for a lot of years. So maybe it’s time to move on and do something different with the faces. I don’t know, but it’s a trademark, I guess.}

PN: What do you hope that people take away from your art?

_{AD: There is a lot of stuff in my paintings that is maybe a bit sketchy or not fully worked out, and I think that is how I see life in general. We all have our bad sides, and I think we should embrace our imperfections, more in that sense. And I do hope that people are kind of going to follow that philosophy because it seems like nowadays you only have to be perfect. You have to look perfect, act perfect, upload multiple times a week to be relevant, and it’s like a 24-hour economy, and I just don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t feel like a perfect person, and I’m absolutely not a perfect person. But those imperfections are also what completes a person, you know? So, I mean, for me it’s always a search for completion instead of perfection. And I hope that other people will be more like that as well so we can all become normal again.} 

PN: You started out quite young, as a teenager. Were you interested in art since childhood, or did it develop over time?_‍

_{AD: I always liked creating stuff. Whether it was drawing, or writing, or we would make comedy sketches when we were 10, 11, and make home movies and also do Jackass kind of stuff, but it was more just as a fun outlet. I never considered it to become a career. I kind of lost that creative side while I was a teenager, and then I ended up in a youth psychiatric hospital due to a lot of complicated stuff in my life. When all the therapies seemed to fail, the only thing that I could really express myself in and feel comfortable in was painting and making music. Then when I was 18, I quit high school and I just didn’t have things to do. So, I figured, why not just paint on the streets? And then that evolved in people liking and asking me if I wanted to produce paintings and then I could sell some work, and that’s how I figured that I could make money out of it. But it wasn’t an intention whatsoever. I wanted to study anthropology, but quitting high school didn’t really help the case. So, I figured, I’ll just travel, write and talk to people and create paintings. And, 15 years later, we’re still doing it.}

PN: Do you still write and make music?

_{AD: I mean, I've been doing it on and off over the past years. I want to pick up a lot of these projects again for 2025 because I feel I now have more rest and time to actually develop them. At the same time, I'm also gonna work together with my wife in terms of photography and art and animation and that kind of stuff. All the options are open, so the only hard part is now I have to decide what’s the first thing I’m gonna do, and how I am gonna do it. But I would love to do that and work more on the streets, doing installations again, actually.} 

PN: What kind of installations would you do, or have you done? 

_{AD: I used to make these big portraits out of cardboard. Here up north, we have those tunnels under the train tracks, and it's usually completely empty at night. So, I would install these portraits and maybe install a chair or something, and make it like a living room scene. I would like to do that more. I think it's, it's more fun, you know, and it's also less harmful, in the sense that cops don't write tickets for cardboard.}

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PN: When you make something like a living room in those tunnels, is there a message behind it? 

_{AD: Not necessarily. It's how I got into street art as well. It was just like, it's fun finding things. I mean, don't get me wrong, I do enjoy large scale murals, but I don't think it's the most exciting way to discover street art. So, whenever I would walk through a city and spot something small then it excites me, and I hope that other people get excited by that as well. When I first started out, I used to have a girlfriend, like all down near Maastricht, which was like a four-hour train ride. I would make these pieces on cardboard and put them in the train and make a traveling exhibit, and that kind of stuff. I think that's more fun, you know, just to put it where people don't expect it, and people can take it off the wall and take it with them, and it's more of a fun way to enjoy it, instead of that huge ass building that's staring you in the face that is fully colored.}‍

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PN: That’s really interesting, because I don’t know that much about street art, so I just usually associate it with tagging and murals, so I never considered those little things to be a part of it.

‍_{AD: There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in the street art scene that is kind of overshadowed, I guess, by the large-scale commercial murals. It’s kind of like pop music is music and punk music is music, but they’re way different.}

PN: It feels more commercial in a way nowadays with these huge murals. And some of them are really nice, but it feels like, if it’s allowed or sanctioned by the government, it’s almost ineffective._‍

_{AD: Yeah, it is. I mean, there are two sides of that story, of course. One side is very positive that muralism is a career now, and you get the opportunity to get paid for that kind of work, and that's fun, but at the same time, because it gets sanctioned, people are sticking to their opinions and rules. Nine out of 10 times when people ask me to do a mural, I'll get a list of stuff that I can't implement in the mural, and then I'll cancel the job, because either you hire me for my work and me as an artist, or you find someone else. I guess, the freedom of the artist and the artistic expression is kind of, in a way, censored for all these large projects because it has to be suitable for a whole neighborhood. It shouldn't be political, it shouldn't be sexual, it shouldn't be offensive. And we live in a time where everything can be offensive. So, it's hard to do your job in that sense. But hey, to each their own.}

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PN: Earlier you were saying that you like to write and make music. What kind of writing do you do? What kind of music?

‍_{AD: It’s like myself all the way: all over the place. There are some fictional stories. There's a lot of poetry, some spoken words. In terms of music, I like to make hip hop. It's not something that I’m confident about getting out now, but maybe in the future. I like to just create music that is setting a tone, you know, so that you can partner it with a specific type of artwork, or you can partner it with video. And, yeah, I just like that. I like sampling that kind of stuff.}

PN: Do you like to sample other music, or do you sample in the field as well? 

_{AD: Both. I am a huge music lover, so I do like to keep up with cool stuff and see how I can give it another purpose. And we also sampled stuff from, for example, one of the US tours I did with the people that we spoke with on the street. And who knows, I'm more of a raccoon in that sense, where I like to collect a lot of stuff, whether it's digitally or physically. And then sometimes I'll take five to 10 years maybe, to use those kinds of samples or snippets, but there's always a use for them.}‍

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PN: You must have a big archive._‍

_{AD: I do have hard drives filled with Pinterest boards and images and music and videos, and I always become obsessive with it, because I'm always afraid that all the stuff that I save online can disappear with the website. I need my backlog in that sense. So, yeah, it's filled with a lot of stuff.}

PN: What kind of artists do you currently like, or what are your biggest influences? From the past or present._‍

_{AD: In terms of artists and their work, I'm very much into Malevich, Rothko, like all the abstract artists actually, that are in no way similar to the stuff that I'm doing. I like musicians like, for example, Tyler, The Creator, and people that are taking big risks and changing up what they want to do. I think in terms of street artists, Swoon, Hush, I like Anthony Lister. I like Richard Hambleton; I think in terms of street artists those four. But honestly, I'll get my inspiration from a lot of different stuff. I had a big phase where I would get inspired a lot by the Netflix series “Chef’s Table”, where they follow these Michelin star chefs and how they approach their work. So yeah, I mean, everything can be inspiring, as long as the person who's showing you it is passionate about what they're doing.}‍

PN: In what way would you be inspired by “Chef's Table”? Is it their approach, or the food they make, the way it looks?_‍

_{AD: I think two or three years ago, I had a show for a gallery in Amsterdam, and I really didn't know what to create as a concept, because I always like to turn the whole environment or the space into part of the exhibition. And I remember I did have a concept for it that was, I guess it was based on a tribe of people that survived some shocking thing on earth, but that the right after COVID hit. So, it didn't seem like a fun exhibition. When I was watching Chef's Table, there was an episode with Christina Toshi, who is a baker, and she would recreate things from her childhood, but on a higher level. So, like all the sweets and the deep-fried stuff that she was into as a kid, and that kind of gave me the inspiration of creating an exhibition about the stuff that made me happy as a kid. I built this whole arcade cabinet with the game Street Fighter on it, and I painted the whole cabinet and had some hopscotch tracks across the gallery, so people can do hopscotch. And in that way, it kind of inspired me, you know, by seeing how people come up with their ideas, and that kind of felt like a good and fun thing to do, and it was a fun exhibition, so I kind of stole it from her. I guess.}

PN: Do you have any concrete plans right now that you could talk about for your future work? Or is it still unsure?_‍

_{AD: A lot of it is still in the development stages. 2025 marks the year that I've been a professional artist for 15 years. So, I want to do something special for it, but I also need to know how I can plan a year in advance and hire the right people for the exhibition, because I kind of want to do it as a standalone exhibition instead of with a gallery. The only thing I can clearly now say is that my wife and I are going to work together and create a new type of studio and do a collection of work, and that's what we're going to focus on for the majority of the year. And that's really exciting. I never worked together with someone, especially not someone that close. I mean, we did a few projects in the past, but now to combine the ideas and have an extra set of hands and brains, it's nice, you know? I think we can develop something nice.}

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