Artist: Daria Blum

Claridge’s ArtSpace presents 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.

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.

For her first UK solo exhibition, Blum will transform the John Pawson designed Claridge’s ArtSpace in Brook’s Mews with an enveloping, performative installation — a multichannel video piece directs the viewer’s attention, while spot and theatre lights create alternating atmospheres. In an evocative dialogue with the subterranean architecture of the gallery, the site-specific work further evolves Blum’s research into muscle memory, institutional power and degradation as they relate to dance, architecture, and intergenerational female relationships.

Daria Blum: Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot is conceived around a three-channel video piece which follows Blum’s fictional character through deserted rooms and corridors of a declining 1970’s office building. The protagonist comes across a series of choreographies that she reenacts together with gestures she has picked up from various sources: black and white portraits of Blum’s late grandmother, the Ukrainian ballerina Daria Nyzankiwska, archival recordings of dance rehearsals, and footage of a 2022 performance by Blum herself.

While questioning how history and abstract knowledge are transmitted and contained by movement, Blum’s multi-layered and non-linear work also refers to the online circulation of popular dance trends and draws on texts such as Arabella Stanger’s Dancing on Violent Ground or Beatriz Colomina’s writing on architecture and sexuality.

Through a series of live performances, Blum inhabits an agitated live character who disrupts and criticises, pointing fingers at the bodies on-screen and voices offstage. Taking stock of the water damage and deterioration afflicting the building’s interior, she comments on the issues of privacy and physical pain as experienced through the lens of architectural maintenance and decay.

Blum’s artistic practice continues to be informed by methodologies of staging and choreography, influenced by her training for over twenty years at her mother’s ballet school in Lucerne, Switzerland. Shown in the film, the now demolished dance studios act as a gateway to thinking about classical dance as an ‘archaeological site’. Blum recently completed a two-month residency at CAPC in Bordeaux, where parts of the video were filmed, and where she researched the city’s avant-garde performance festival ‘Sigma’, and the early history of French ballet. 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 absent bodies, voices, and buildings, each succumbing to ideals of power and regeneration.

Live performances will take place throughout the five-week exhibition run. Dates and times can be found on https://www.claridges.co.uk/claridges-artspace. The installation will be supported by several of Blum’s works, including a new series of sculptures and photographs, exhibited across the gallery and the Claridge’s ArtSpace Café and available for purchase.