Preview: DARIA MARTIN

Maureen Paley is pleased to present Daria Martin’s latest film for her third solo exhibition at the gallery. A Hunger Artist, HD film, (2017) adapts Franz Kafka’s 1922 modernist short story of the same name: a strange allegory about spectacle, spectators, power and narcissism.   

The phenomenon of hunger artists, which appeared from the 18th to the early 20th century, became a form of entertainment to receptive audiences at sideshows, fairs and circuses. Fasting for up to 40 days their deteriorated bodies became objects of macabre fascination.

The hunger artist central to Martin’s adaptation, played by Hayley Carmichael, fasts for years to wide adulation until his craft goes out of style. Upon leaving his long-term impresario and joining the circus, he performs for unappreciative and doubtful spectators, creating the neglect that leads to his eventual death.

The film highlights the contradictory human experience of our bodies as both ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’. Martin has previously mined film’s capacities to communicate subjective states, as well as to clinically frame objects. A Hunger Artist continues her explorations regarding states of being – levels of consciousness, the internal and the external in both body and mind.

A Hunger Artist by Daria Martin was made with support by Schering Stiftung, Berlin, Germany; Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK and VISUAL, Carlow, Ireland. Further funding has been provided by Wellcome Trust, London, UK; Arts Council England, London, UK; University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, UK and St John’s College, Oxford, UK.   

Martin was recently nominated for the Jarman Award 2018 and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Curve Gallery, Barbican, London in January 2019. Last year she published the edited volume Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art (2017) with Oxford University Press.