Daria Martin:
Tonight the World

Drawing upon dream diaries kept by her grandmother over a 35 year period, Jarman Award winning artist Daria Martin stages a series of intimate encounters in her new installation for The Curve. Tonight the World envelops viewers in an exploration of the traumatic history of her grandmother, who fled the imminent Nazi occupation of her country, then Czechoslovakia. Retracing this emotional history, Martin considers the unconscious underpinnings of intergenerational trauma, loss and resilience.

Curator Florence Ostende sat down with Martin to discuss family connections, psychoanalysis and transgenerational trauma.

Florence Ostende: The dream diaries of your grandmother, Susi Stiassni, play a central role in the exhibition for The Curve. Many of the themes addressed in her archive of dreams have been recurring in your work: fantasy, memory and womanhood. How did you become aware of the diaries?

Daria Martin: Your question brings up, already, the fallibility of our memories! When I spent the night at her house as a child, she would be absent during the late mornings, transcribing her dreams. The diaries grew, day by day, in parallel with our relationship, picking up steam in the early 1970s and only ending in 2005 when she died. Susi’s diaries were there as long as I can remember, supported by a sturdy shelf in her study. It was only after her death – and she did give the family permission to read them – that I realised what a massive body of unpublished work this was. If she had channelled her energy differently, would this have been an epic poem, or a series of plays? Was it as utterly private as it first appeared or was a future reader at the back of her mind?

FO: Such a rigorous undertaking is quite extraordinary, especially over a period of 35 years. Why do you think she kept the diaries and what is it that makes them unique?

DM: She was doing detective work on her soul, looking for clues. She believed that paying close attention to her dreams would give her access to the hidden parts of herself to reveal her full potential. As if at night one could depart from daily life to encounter more vivid images, experiences or alternate selves. This sort of pursuit isn’t unique, although the scale of the dream diaries – more than 20,000 pages – may very well be. Despite accumulating into a mass that looks quite obsessive overall, they aren’t written in a rushed and emotional way. Oddly, the pages are almost forensic: typed, organised, factual. In lifting the dreams off the page and placing them on screen, I wanted to reinvest them with what I imagine was their original physical and emotional intensity.

FO: You seemed very close to her, a connection that goes even deeper than family bonds.

DM: Susi was a painter and inspired me to become an artist. As I grew up in California, her soft, ethereal, colour-field paintings were all around me, blanketing the walls of her large house. As a small child, I would paint alongside her in her studio, and I would feel that I had participated a little in her process. Although I stopped painting long ago, abstraction is still there in my films in miniature: in the pointillist rainbow dots of the film grain. We remained close, but despite this – or perhaps because of it – she didn’t speak about certain things.

FO: When I discovered your work I was immediately attracted by the sensorial act of viewing your films. The focus on objects, textures and patterns speaks to all the senses. The way your films go beyond the visual faculty is also rendered through the sculptural presence of their display in the exhibition space. How did you use the space of The Curve as an extension of film?

DM: The film penetrates the villa and inhabits the dreams, but other aspects of the exhibition hint at constricted access. At the gallery’s entrance, you are confronted with a play through of the videogame, which ends with an image taken from a family photograph of Susi as a child, with her back turned, in her playroom. The epic expanse of The Curve then takes you on a journey. As you know, it was built as an empty sound buffer at the back of the Barbican Concert Hall, so it is itself a liminal space. The outer, semi-circular wall is impressive, but the inner wall is more dream-like and convoluted, full of eccentricities and rough edges, which we’ve exaggerated in the exhibition design by a fragmented ‘graft’ wall that bulges out and eventually squeezes the viewer against the gallery’s outer wall. At this maximum point of crisis, you can peek into the inner wall and view, only from a distance, the selected archive of the 275 dream diaries about Brno. Travelling further, within a break in the wall, a 3D-printed robot stands sentry, as if on a threshold between the virtual and the physical. Finally you emerge to find a curved anamorphic film screen, initially with its back turned. The different stages of the exhibition register at different emotional temperatures. Moving around the freestanding screen to view the film is a bit like the process of waking up from a dream and recalling it only dimly and gradually, as the day wears on – remembering it in detail.

Watch the trailer for Daria Martin: Tonight the World

Daria Martin: Tonight the World takes place in The Curve from 31 Jan–7 Apr 2019. Admission is free.

You can read the full interview in the fully illustrated catalogue, available to purchase from the Barbican Shop or online at barbican.org.uk/shop for £12.

About Daria Martin

Daria Martin is an internationally exhibited artist living in London, and Professor of Art at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Martin’s films aim to create continuity between disparate media such as painting and performance, between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds.

Martin was born in 1973 in San Francisco. After studying humanities at Yale, she received her Master in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. Martin was recently awarded the 2018 Film London Jarman Award and is represented by Maureen Paley, London.