Daria Martin at the Tate Modern

In the Palace (2000) is a 16 mm film shot by Professor Daria Martin for her MFA thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is on display in 'The Tanks' at the Tate Modern, London, until 30 November 2025.

The film shows four performers holding poses within a cage-like structure. The set is a large-scale reproduction of artist Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. from 1932. As Professor Martin explains, the film began as ‘a daydream’ about what it would be like to enter Giacometti’s work. ‘It was quite a shock, months later, to finally stand inside the 25-foot-high version that I built with my art-school friends.’

The camera circles around the Giacometti-inspired set. Inside, performers recreate poses from early-20th-century dance productions. Martin describes the art and dance of this period as ‘open to the contamination of humour, exaggeration, pathos, play, and awkwardness’. Accompanied by the sounds of birdsong and rain, Martin’s film creates a dream-like setting that reestablishes the connections between early-20th-century artforms and the human body. In the artist’s words: ‘In a way, the film projection ... is like a maquette or model: physical space and action has been compressed, but the on-screen images hold the potential, in the imagination, to expand into an entire world, to spring to life.’

Please visit tate.org.uk for further information about the film.

Professor Martin's 2004 short film, Soft Materials, will also be on display at the New Museum, New York, later this year. Shot in the artificial intelligence lab at the University of Zurich, Soft Materials portrays the interaction between two human performers, trained in body awareness, and robots programmed to learn from physical experience. 'These performers shed skins of soft fabric, bear their joints like the frank structure of a machine, and, nude, approach the robots as if they were sentient beings. Creating intimate relationships that are in turns tender, funny and eerie, they bend flexible human fantasy around tough materials'.

Professor Martin's film will be part of the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future which will inaugurate the New Museum’s expanded building with an exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.

Many congratulations, Daria!