I'm So Disappointed In You
Live performance, 55 min, 5-channel video and live camera feed, remote controlled lighting, Tate Modern South Tank, 2025
Daria Blum presents a multimedia live performance, titled I’m So Disappointed In You, a reflection on female alliances, desire, and rivalry that encompasses video, music, text and choreography. Incorporating a monologue set in Berlin in the 2010s, Blum embodies various alter egos whose names echo her own; with Daphne, Dahlia, and Daisy assuming leading roles. Through a first-person perspective, the artist narrates the encounters and disputes between these insubordinate characters, moving between different voices and mannerisms, and conversing, arguing and duetting with her counterparts on- and off-screen.
Traveling between electronic and physical spaces; sampling, looping and remixing digital debris, implementing literary and theatrical devices, Blum’s work investigates how ‘breaking character’ can disrupt prevailing forms of engagement with the world. Through live interaction with domestic props and lighting, on-screen text, music and phone recordings, the artist brings her female characters into the liminal spaces of hostel lobbies, club toilets and waiting rooms, and invites her audience to observe and consider how they perform within them.
This performance was part of Digital Intimacies, a programme in response to Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern.
Photos: Moritz Tibes
Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot
3-channel video installation and live performance, Claridge's ArtSpace, 2024
Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot centres 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 and gestures she picks 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. The work draws on Blum’s research into muscle memory, institutional power and degradation as they relate to dance, architecture, and intergenerational female relationships.
Blum investigates the gesture of the pointed finger through a short live performance serving as an introduction to the work.
Redeflect 1-36
Microphone stands, prop microphones, pop filters, digital print on polyester, variable heights, 2024
Do You See That
Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 114 x 83 cm, 2024
On Pointing On
Live performance, 30 min, 2024
Commissioned for Festival Académie des Mutantes, CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, June 2024
Daria Blum’s performance ‘On Pointing On’ sees the figure of the 'misbehaved girl' reincarnated by a cast of characters, multiplied across video screens and live performance. Taking the Bordeaux Ballet’s ‘La Fille Mal Gardée’ as a reference point, Blum reinterprets the wayward daughter who, frustrated by the loss of voice, discovers the gesture of the pointing finger as a tool for communication as well as coercion. Conducting the music, claiming attention, casting a spell, the various characters ‘point out’, toward and away from each other, as they alternate between harmonies and cacophonies of a ritualistic insubordination.
Photos: Arthur Péquin
With Urgency
With Urgency
In collaboration with Guendalina Cerruti and Mary Stephenson. Video, 22 min, 2024
Decollapse 1-5
Stainless steel light stands, digital print on adhesive film, dimensions variable, 2024
Ilenia, London, March 2024.
You Say Vol. 2
Live performance, 35 min, 2023
Commissioned for Roskilde Festival, Denmark, July 2023.
Not Something You Say
Installation, 30 mins, looped, 2023
Painted steel and Perspex structure, three channel HD video, three channel audio, variable lighting, aluminium frames, miscellaneous props
Live performance, 30 min, 2023
The performances had variable starting and end points
Video of performance here
Is This All There Is
Artist's studio desk during first year studying at the Royal Academy Schools
69 x 183 cm, 2019
Ring Ring
Digital print on curtains
340 x 240 cm
Shown as part of RA Schools Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June 2023.
The single 'Radical' was released in conjunction with the show.
Circumbendibus Vol. 1 & 2
Live performance, 25 min, 2022
Performed at Open Studios, Royal Academy of Arts, London, November 2022
and at within Guendalina Cerruti's exhibition Ohh... Youth!, V.O Curations, London, November 2022.
Video of performance here
Circumbendibus chronicles the killing off and eventual resurrection of a former alter ego, and elaborated on criticism she received and the artist's own frustration with the narcissistic character. Working from a script for the first time, Blum embodied a range of voices and roles using monologue and song. She also laments a period of renovations she underwent at her flat, and of the unfortunate encounters with ‘the BOYS’, thinking through gender stereotypes, heteronormative queerness, false binaries, and dust.
Dust which settles on literally every surface, ends up in every god damn crack, in my hair, in her lungs, all over the house, FOR EVER AND ALL ETERNITY.
The annotated performance script was published as an A5 publication, edition of 50. Email to purchase one (£25).
A mixtape containing live recordings of the tracks written for ‘Circumbendibus’ was released in early 2023.
Wanna Be Me Wanna
HD Video, 3 min 25 sec, 2020
Screened at CIRCA x Dazed Class of 2022, Piccadilly Circus, London, September 2022
and at Roskilde Festival, Main Stage, Denmark, July 2023.
If You Could
Live performance, 8 min, 2022
Performed at Premiums 3, Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 2022.
The cover song 'If You Could Read My Mind', originally written and performed by Gordon Lightfoot, was released in conjunction with the performance.
Afterglow x 74
74 unique objects: folded, printed T-shirts, recycled polyester jersey, 2022
Exhibited at Premiums 3, Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 2022.
All 74 items were available to purchase on www.daria.land
Daria in: Semper Aeternum
Live performance, 25 min, 2022
Performed as part of the closing party for Louis Morlæ's exhibition Machinochrome Dreams, Rose Easton, London, February 2022.
BIBL
Baby I've been lonely, I've been missing you
A single line from the song 'I've Been Missing You', which Blum wrote during the height of the pandemic, is chanted repeatedly, looped and layered over itself. Her multiple voices begin to harmonize, and the melancholy verse swells into a euphoric hymn inside the unconsecrated Fitzrovia Chapel, as loneliness becomes an experience witnessed together.
Live performance, 8 min, 2021
Performed at DISCO, Fitzrovia Chapel, London, August 2021.
Video of performance here
To Bean
Look. At. These. Beans.
Would you ... just ...
lookatthesebeans
Look at them !!!
Live performance, 15 min, 2019
Performed at RA Open Studios, London, November 2019
and at Hold On, The Koppel Project, London, January 2020.
I'll Be Here If You Need Me
Hello, you rat.
Did you know this wooden table is from our old kitchen?
I’m going to make a stew.
It just has to make sense to me, somehow. I’m going to get one of those rabbits in Sempach.
They’re getting that Urbrot again at the health food store in Zug, I’ll go get it on Tuesday.
For the Brotanussa?
A recipe book is definitely a good idea.
Just come by ... There’ll be something to eat.
I’ll be here if you need me.
*
Exhibition and two evenings of food and drink, in collaboration with Julian Blum
Presented at Ahoi, Lucerne, Switzerland, August 2020.
QUAGGA
"QUAGGA took place in a large industrial building, including spaces once part of our mother’s former ballet school. The impending demolition of the nearly 100-year-old structure being a catalyst for both our practices over recent years, we presented new, collaborative works created within the historical site, in an attempt to revive past scenarios and imagined narratives played out within the space."
Sculpture, installation, live performance, video, photography, in collaboration with Julian Blum, 2019
Shown at Neustadtstrasse 24a, Lucerne, Switzerland, March 2019.