RA School’s winner Daria Blum’s solo exhibition opens 24 September 2024

The solo exhibition of Daria Blum, the winner of the first Claridge’s Royal Academy Schools Art Prize has been announced by Claridge’s ArtSpace.The exhibition titled Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot is set to open 24 September 2024 in the heart of Mayfair.

Multidisciplinary artist Blum graduated from the Royal Academy 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.

In this multimedia installation, visitors are invited 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.

In an evocative dialogue with the subterranean architecture of the gallery, the site-specific installation further evolves Blum’s research into the relationship between physical space and muscle memory, choreography and embodiment, and notions of institutional power as they relate to dance and architecture.

Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot centres around a three-channel video work which follows Blum’s fictional character as she walks through deserted rooms and corridors of a disused 1970’s office building.

The protagonist comes across a cachet of materials which she reenacts as an act of reclamation: black and white portraits of Blum’s late grandmother, the Ukrainian ballerina and choreographer Daria Nyzankiwska, archival recordings of dance rehearsals, and footage of a 2022 performance by Blum herself.

Through a series of live performances, Blum further inhabits a live character who disrupts and criticises, pointing fingers at the bodies on-screen and the voices offstage.

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.

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.

The installation will also be supported by several of Blum’s works including sculptures and a series of photographs to be exhibited in the Claridge’s ArtSpace Café and which will be available for purchase.