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1-14 of 14
- Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town surrounded by a tropical forest. The city's economy, and consequently its citizens' lives, revolve around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest steel mill in Latin America. Steel Town, a long-form HD video, will focus on working-class life in Volta Redonda, building a critical dialogue between art, popular television and politics. The idea for the film arose out of Martin's conversations with anthropologist Massimiliano ('Mao') Mollona, a specialist in labour issues and visual anthropology who conducted eight months of fieldwork in Volta Redonda. Together with Mollona, Martin instigated a theatre workshop (facilitated by a director from the Center of Theater of the Oppressed, Rio) with a dozen members of the local community, aimed at transforming personal stories into the widely recognised melodramatic form of the 'telenovela'. Martin filmed the process of the workshop, as well as the resulting ten-minute long soap opera script on location around Volta Redonda. Martin also filmed 'candid' scenes within the city's working-class, gentrified, and commercial neighbourhoods. Martin's and Mollona's plan is to interweave this material in an edit that complicates boundaries between 'documentary' and 'melodramatic' registers. They seek to ask questions about the nature of the 'political image'; what happens when it is skewed and arguably enlarged by fantasy and fiction?
- Theatre of the Tender completes a trilogy of films. As with Sensorium Tests and At the Threshold, Theatre of the Tender is inspired by mirror-touch synaesthesia, the neurological phenomenon in which observed touch to other bodies and objects is palpably felt. The film implicitly and explicitly asks questions around the meaning of created images, shared languages, and communities. From a theatre workshop based on Augosto Boal's 'Theatre of the Oppressed' techniques, we depart to watch two individuals navigating solitude, one in the mountains and the other in the city's underground.
- Choreographer Rosemary Butcher got her start experimenting at the Judson Church, New York City crucible of post-modern dance, and in the three decades since has created performances that transform everyday movements into intense, arresting forms. Butcher approached Martin to make a film of her recent piece, Lapped, Translated Lines, which was born of discussions with dancer Elena Giannotti about Darwin's writings on animal morphology. Suggestive of a beast vigilantly traversing its territory, and secondarily of Butchers' restless memories of her New York history, the dance called for a similarly doubled physical and ephemeral manifestation. Butcher wanted to project Martin's commissioned film alongside the live performance, creating a hybrid that would span physical action and psychological presence. Martin, curious whether she could carve into the space of the tightly compact, almost caged, choreography, chose to emphasise the camera's mediation: masked by a gridded structure, or tied to the dancer's body, swimming through the air at the end of a stick, or functioning like a magnifying glass, the camera reveals viewpoints that an audience member, sitting on a set of bleachers, would not otherwise access. In order to balance the film's presence with that of the live performer, Butcher pared-down Giannotti's onstage movements to the point where they slowed or sometimes even stopped to take on the form of a seated figure who watched the film along with the audience. The installation was completed by Post-Works' snaking metallic form, evoking a landscape or a piece of frozen dance notation, and by Cathy Lane's soundscape, composed, in part, of Butcher's recordings made in New York.
- Sensorium Tests was exhibited in the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Within a scientific facility, subjective perceptions take center stage. A woman is being measured in a controlled laboratory environment for her capacity to respond to sensory stimuli while two researchers, hidden behind a one way mirror, look on. The subject's responses to selected objects (a speaker, a fan, a lamp, and finally, a person) mimic the real-life neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia, the inextricable joining of normally separate perceptions ('hearing' colors, 'smelling' words, 'tasting' shapes, 'feeling' names). In particular, our protagonist is tested for a form of synaesthesia in which visually observed touch -to objects or to people- is felt viscerally on her own body. As the experiment progresses, the synaesthete begins to sense a presence behind the one-way mirror, imaginatively bridging the alienating strangeness of the situation. Sensorium Tests questions how sensations might be created and shared between people and objects.
- Birds, exhibited at part of the Tate Modern's permanent collection, is a kind of magic act that shows how the trick is done. The film mines pre-digital tools, using archaic film tricks, the contrived staginess of theatre, the old-fashioned pleasures of the 'plastic arts' and the transformative thrill of fashion to create a completely different kind of 'virtual reality'. Fantasy is made tangible through visible seams and holes, and as a result, attention vacillates between the transformation of everyday materials, and that transformation's failure. A soundtrack crafted on the moog synthesizer grounds the gliding world in ironic analog humility.
- Closeup Gallery is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, New York. A sleight of hand artist and an actress play a strange game at a table with layers like transparent wheels, communicating in a secret code, both hiding and revealing meaning. Colored playing cards are shuffled, spread, stacked, arranged, thrown, and mysteriously substituted, to a yearning soundtrack of voice and electronics.
- One of The Things..., exhibited in Martin's survey show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, illuminates a web of images suspended between Martin's own body of film work and her late grandmother's dream diaries. Entries from the diaries - read out by performers featured in her previous films - are matched with outtakes from these ten years' worth of films. One of the Things - complicates the confessional style of the 'video-diary' by slowly shifting the focus from Martin's grandmother to the actors as a central focus, and through subtle dissonances between their readings of the diaries, their desultory comments on them and their voiceless presence in Martin's past films. Started as an outwards journey of parallel discovery of her grandmothers' dream-memories - recorded over thirty years of Jungian analysis - and of Martin's own cinematic histories, the film slowly acquires a dream-like circularity in which archive and imagination blur and the initial synchronicity between films and diaries is disrupted by gaps, divergences and repetitions. The film is a fantastical and spiraling reflection on the performativity of dreaming, and on cinema as an impossible act of witnessing.
- Inspired by the myth of Persephone and her abduction and imprisonment in the underworld, Daria Martin's Wintergarden is a spellbinding slowdive into the subterranean shadows of the psyche. The film follows the descent-into-darkness (and subsequent recovery) of a young female protagonist, whose unsteady recuperation at a seaside sanatorium is coloured by Martin's own preoccupation with the past, and her penchant for artistic re-creation and revival.
- Minotaur was the center of in a solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York. Octogenarian choreographer Anna Halprin, pioneer of postmodern dance, recently created an erotic performance based on Auguste Rodin's rendering of the Greek legend. Minotaur traces labyrinthine transformations, in which photographs, sculpture and dance succeed and replace one another, and in which bodies and objects appear part of a continuous tissue. Fluctuations between disparate media are accompanied by shifts in gender dynamics; in Rodin's original the half-man / half-bull grips an ambivalent nymph, while in Halprin's iteration the female 'victim' turns the story on its head, wresting a melancholic triumph over her captor. A score by Matmos, which includes the sounds of Rodin sculptures being struck like instruments, echoes the sculpture's muscularity.
- In the Palace, exhibited as part of Martin's survey show at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, began with a daydream to enter inside two inaccessible places, to penetrate the tinyness of Giacometti's surrealist sculpture The Palace at 4am (1932) and to move beyond the flatness of various photographs of early Modern stage and dance productions. In this film, Giacometti's sculpture (which in a sense already resembles a theatrical model) is streamlined and scaled up to become a stage set proper; the posed theatrical stills are restaged as tableaux vivants. Clothed in home-made costumes and striking stock poses, the performers in In the Palace parade degraded moments of 20th Century culture: the theatrical gestures of the Bauhaus, George Platt Lyne's lush photographs of the American Ballet Theater, the stylized choreography of The Ballet Russe, Martha Graham's Lamentation.
- 'What Italian philosopher Mario Perniola has called 'the sex appeal of the inorganic' remain central to Martin's vision.' (Art Forum) 'As for many feminist artists before her, the body itself is the site of the vitality of art.' (Frieze) Soft Materials (2004), staging a fictional relationship between humans and robots, that has been exhibited in dozens of public art galleries around the world including: the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, The Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paolo, Kunsthalle Zurich, and Haus der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin. Soft Materials was shot in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich where scientists research 'embodied artificial intelligence'. This cutting edge area of AI produces robots which, rather than being programmed from the 'head down' by a computer 'brain', instead learn to function through the experience of their physical bodies. Soft Materials introduces to these robots two performers, one man and one woman, trained in body awareness, acutely sensitive to the nuances of movement, primed to mimic the robots in a play of reciprocity. 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.
- Winner of the 2018 Jarman Award, A Hunger Artist adapts Kafka's 1924 short story, an ambiguous allegory about spectacle and spectators; power, narcissism, and resistance. A public showman fasts for years to wide adulation, until his craft goes out of style. He is left to perform for unappreciative spectators and, ultimately, to barely please only himself, unto death. The film highlights the contradictory human experience of our bodies as both 'objects' and 'subjects.'
- Exhibited at The Barbican, London, Tonight the World draws from a cross-section of dream diaries kept by Martin's grandmother, Susi Stiassni, who fled the imminent Nazi occupation of Czechoslavakia in 1938. Through five chapters, the film links as many dreams sited in Susi's childhood home, Villa Stiassni, a modernist mansion built by Susi's parents, who were prominent Jewish textile manufacturers in the industrial hub of Brno. Conjured in Susi's imagination from her middle-age onwards, in the context of psychoanalysis, the dream diaries as a whole span 40 years and 40,000 dreams, but Martin's selection focuses tightly on dreams about intruders within the Villa, recreating a narrative of threat and escape that parallels Susi's lived experience. Retracing the legacy of her grandmother's emotional history, Martin considers the unconscious underpinnings of intergenerational trauma, loss and resilience.
- Part of the Performa07 Biennial, Harpstrings and Lava channels the tension inherent in certain nightmares, specifically in one friend's ghoulish fantasy about clashing contradictions. In this particular recurrent dream, tensile harpstrings and viscous lava inhabited the same space simultaneously, creating a sensation of visceral dread. Harpstrings and Lava aims to gently animate such 'hyper-real' dream images, drawing the viewer closer to the feeling of inexorable, anxious attachment shared by the onscreen characters.