Professor Daria Martin

Professor Daria Martin

Supernumerary Fellow in Fine Art

Subjects

Biography

1995 B.A. Humanities, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Yale University. 1999 Artist in residence, Cite Internationale des arts, Paris. 2000 M.F.A., cum laude, University of California, Los Angeles. 2002 Artist in residence, Delfina Studios Trust, London. 2009 Philip Leverhulme Prize.

I was born in San Francisco in 1973, and live and work in London. I have had solo exhibitions in international venues such as the New Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

At St John's, and at the Ruskin School of Art, I teach freely across artistic media and disciplines. I also run a course on filmmaking entitled ‘Film Sensorium’ in which we explore, practically and in theory, the overlap between industrial and art filmmaking, and the manifold sensory and conceptual possibilities opened by the medium.

Research Interests

My 16mm films aim to create a continuity or parity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds.  Human gesture and seductive imagery meet physically mannered artifice to pry loose viewers’ learned habits of perception.  

Subjects such as robots, an archive of dream diaries and close-up card magic, are explored within isolated spaces such as the wings of a theatre, a military academy, or a scaled up modernist sculpture. These protective yet fragmented settings, full of seams and shadows, stand in for the capacities of the film medium itself, a permeable container that consumes and recycles the world at large.  

Some areas of research that inspire my work include historical and contemporary notions of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ (total artwork), cinematic theories of embodied spectatorship, postmodern dance’s task-based movements, scientific and artistic investigations of synaesthesia, genres of performance in which props play a significant role, feminist and gender theory, and the anthropological concept of animism.

Publications

Selected publications, exhibitions and performances: 2001 Solo exhibition, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Group exhibition, National Gallery, Tirana. 2003 Solo exhibition, Tate Britain, London. Group Exhibition, Museo Castello di Rivoli, Turin. 2005 Solo exhibitions, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg; Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich; The Showroom, London. Group exhibitions, Tate Britain, London; The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. 2006 Publication, Daria martin, Kunsthalle Zurich and Kunstverein in Hamburg, jrp ringer. Performance, in collaboration with Zeena Parkins, Tate Modern, London.