Artist: Daria Blum

To celebrate the first anniversary of the gallery, Palmer Gallery is launching The Door, a new programme hosted in the annexed space at the back of the gallery. The Door’s first presentation is by Daria Blum, a performance artist and Royal Academy Schools alumna.

The work presented at Palmer Gallery is based on Blum’s reflections on the role of the live performer, and her own attempts at deflecting and withdrawing from the audience’s gaze and attention. Blum’s presentation at The Door stages an intriguing interplay of objects, text and lighting, which makes use of reflective surfaces to implicate the viewer and explore how an installation can embody or stand in for semi-fictional personas.

The presentation forms part of a wider body of work that includes Blum’s thought processes around female friendship. Within her text-based work, Blum moves through aspirations, half-truths and fiction, often using a first-person perspective to narrate semi-autobiographical relationships, encounters, and disputes between various female characters and alter egos. Parts of this written text were included in her recent installation ‘Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot’ at Claridge’s ArtSpace, in which chronic cranial pain was personified as both an intrusive female presence and a compulsive liar. Blum’s work at The Door delves further into themes of dishonesty, deflection, and fiction within performance, sculpture, and storytelling.

About the artist
Concerned with performance in its broadest sense, Daria Blum portrays a range of insubordinate female archetypes, multiplying ‘her self’ across video, music, text, photography, and installation to suggest how ‘breaking character’ can destabilize entrenched forms of engagement with the world. Conflating the stage with ‘real’ life, Blum mythologizes her own history as an artist, and expands everyday events into full-fledged dramas, drawing on theatre and autotheory to comment on the politics of self-objectification and contemporary modes of mediation. With an episodic approach, alter egos are killed off, resurrected or referenced through the sampling, looping, and remixing of leftover materials and digital debris.

Daria graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2023. She was the recipient of the inaugural Claridge’s Art Prize, awarded by Marina Abramović, with her work recently featured at Claridge’s Art Space. She has exhibited and performed at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Ilenia, London (2024); Roskilde Festival, Denmark (2023); and at V.O Curations, Piccadilly Lights, and Kupfer in London (2022).