Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot
24th September, 2024 – 25th October, 2024
Claridge’s ArtSpace
Brook’s Mews
London W1K 4HR
Claridge’s ArtSpace is delighted to announce the exhibition Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot by Royal Academy Schools graduate Daria Blum, the winner of the first Claridge’s Royal Academy Schools Art Prize set to open 24 September 2024 in the heart of Mayfair.
Multidisciplinary artist Blum graduated from the RA Schools in 2023, and her work was selected for the £30,000 award by judges Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA and Eva Rothschild RA. The award was presented by performance artist Marina Abramović and introduced by actor, author and co-host of Talk Art Russell Tovey at Claridge’s last September, bringing to life a three-year long partnership and a commitment from Claridge’s and the Maybourne Group to showcasing standout art and supporting the artistic community.
For this exciting debut, Blum will transform the John Pawson designed Claridge’s Artspace in Brook’s Mews with a dynamic and enveloping exhibition. The multimedia installation invites visitors to perceive the space differently: a metre-wide walkway on which the artist performs will follow the perimeter of the gallery space, raised above the floor; spot and theatre lights create alternating atmospheres, while a multichannel video and sound piece will direct the focus of the viewer’s attention. Live performances will take place regularly throughout the five-week exhibition run, punctuating the installation and completing it, with artist Blum taking centre stage.
Between the ages of three and 22, Blum trained at her mother’s ballet school in Lucerne, Switzerland, and her artistic practice continues to be influenced by methodologies of staging and choreography. Questioning how history and abstract knowledge are transmitted and contained by movement, and the ways in which the meaning of dance shifts through the bodies that perform them over time, Blum’s multi-layered, non-linear work also refers to the online circulation of popular dance trends, while drawing on texts such as Arabella Stanger’s Dancing on Violent Ground or Beatriz Colomina’s writing on architecture and sexuality.
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Underscoring the narrative impulses of the work is the artist’s most recent research into early French ballet and avant-garde performance, undertaken as part of a residency at CAPC in Bordeaux, where the video was filmed. Treating classical dance as an ‘archaeological site’, Blum questioned what it means to re-perform choreographies that contain a range of misogynistic and colonial tropes and, looking specifically at how French ideals inspired Imperial Russia, she mapped a form of family tree to connect historical dance figures to her Ukrainian forebears, tracking how choreography travelled via bodies across state lines.
Against the backdrop of a decaying and declining architecture, Blum teases out an intersectional story of exchanges between bodies and buildings, each succumbing to ideals of power and regeneration.
Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot opens on the 24th of September, 2024 until the 25th of October, 2024 at Claridge’s ArtSpace
©2024 Daria Blum
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