The brilliant RA graduate Daria Blum is a trans-disciplinary performance artist, and this is the final week to catch her critically acclaimed debut show at Claridge's Art Space. The debut exhibition from the ballet-trained winner of the inaugural Claridge's Royal Academy Schools Art Prize transforms the space into an enveloping, multimedia installation in which immersive video and sound pieces spark an evocative dialogue with the architecture of the gallery. Wildly innovative in nature, Blum’s artistic practice draws on movement, choreography, and staging, and is complemented at Claridge's Art Space by photographs across the gallery and the ArtSpace Café. In this interview with House Collective Journal, the artist shares her artistic vision and takes us inside the conceptual genesis of the show.
Your work is inherently performative, comprised of both music and dance, which also comes from training in ballet from an early age. Has this always been a core part of expression for you as an artist?
Yes, I think so. Even before I started performing within my own work (first to camera and later live) I was approaching most mediums with rhythm, musicality, and choreography in mind. I always think about the way in which objects enter and exit a space, and the time-based nature of experiencing still works of art.I make use of architectural structures in my performances to emphasise cognitive processes or power dynamics: For my 2022 piece ‘Circumbendibus’ I built a round, heavy, and barely rotating stage to denote the act of ‘going in circles’, and for my RA degree show I performed on top of a tall, metal tower which allowed me to, figuratively as well as literally, ‘talk down to’ my audience.
Was this a similar set up for your show at Claridge’s ArtSpace, Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot?
I had initially planned to create a raised platform around the perimeter of the gallery space. However, the film work ended up taking on a much more prominent role than anticipated and I decided to expand on the sculptural elements instead. The work builds on my ongoing research into muscle memory, institutional power and degradation as they relate to dance, architecture, and intergenerational female relationships. The show is conceived around a three-channel video piece which follows a fictional character through deserted rooms and corridors of a declining 1970’s office building where she comes across a series of choreographies that she reenacts, together with gestures she has picked up from various sources.
What about the sculptures in the show?
The sculptures in the show reference an absence of the voice, which was important to me during the making of this show. The live performance focuses on the simple gesture of the pointed finger — as a tool to claim or deflect attention — and unravels the character of the ‘performer’ to some degree. Working on the show, I had recently experienced a flood at my apartment, and my mind was filled with ideas about water leakages and drips, a home being invaded or falling apart, things related to loss, but also new beginnings. I often thematise architectural maintenance and decay in relation to interpersonal relationships and needs. Subtitles in the video piece describe the personification of this chronic jaw pain/headache as a female character whoenters and disrupts the privacy of the home.
The idea of how choreography travels is interesting, and the sense of there being colonial tropes. How does your work express that?
During a recent residency in France, I came across archival images and newspaper clippings about performers, dancers, or ballet masters—names or faces I recognized from my mother’s stories of her time as a dancer. I began to map out a family tree through notes, photographs and conversations with her, and was able to connect via various dance figures to her mother Daria Nyzankiwska, who was a ballerina at Ukraine’s Lviv Opera House. In the video there is this attempt to ‘embody’ the grandmother I never knew, synchronising my own movements with the still poses of her in black and white portraits. Shown in the video piece is my mother’s ballet school in Lucerne, Switzerland. To me, these now demolished dance studios act as a gateway to reflections on classical dance as an ‘archeological site’, where history, knowledge, and new interpretations can be extracted. I am also interested in the idea of hierarchy within classical ballet companies, and how, historically, this reflected the hierarchy of an existing monarchy. The film begins with the phrase ‘let me in’, which is later set against the closed doors of the Bordeaux Ballet’s rehearsal studios, alluding to the exclusive/exclusionary nature of ballet. In classical dance, striving for and being driven towards perfection, harmony and synchronisation is a reflection of an ordered society—and inherently coercive—and conceals the elimination of the ‘imperfect’. Tensed fingers, for instance, are undesirable in ballet. I use the gesture of the pointed finger as a way to access an attitude of (female) insubordination within this piece and the live performance.
Your process must be fascinating – what does your studio look like, do you have a way of working, either structured or variable, and do you have any ‘studio rituals’?
My studio is very empty! I work from home and mainly sit at my computer. I often get headaches and ‘screen claustrophobia’. But I’ve been working on a healthier routine, I try to go for walks in the park every morning and afternoon. I would love a job that requires me to work outdoors.
Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot by Daria Blum is at Claridge's Art Space until October 25
