the european biennial of contemporary art
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artists

Daria Martin

1973, San Francisco, US Lives in London, UK

Soft Materials, 2004 16 mm film installation, 10’ 5’’

TRENTO

M7

“What fascinates me [about film],” says Daria Martin, “is the essential contradiction of the medium: its layered ephemeral and sensual aspect, its articulation of psychological projection together with a necessary physical realization of fantasy. The camera, circling around or brushing close to constructed sets, props, faces, and bodies, caresses these material elements, intimately describes their sculptural surfaces, and yet, paradoxically, when these images are projected as a beam of light, they become transparent, their heft subtracted. I want to play at seducing the viewer while allowing escape routes from the game. My implementation of certain ideals – primary colors, mechanical or athletic bodies, geometric sets, smooth skinned faces – is always tempered by the presence of something a little more awkward: shadows, seams, aging, exhaustion.” Martin’s Soft Materials features the interactions of “embodied artificial intelligence” robots – programmed to learn new functions through the experiences of their physical bodies – with one man and one woman, both highly trained in movement and body awareness. Playing on the juxtaposition of the flexible and the hard, fantasy and materiality, the resulting sequences are simultaneously funny and eerie. They provoke speculative responses around the question of “man and machine,” new images of technological animal mimesis as well as links with 1960s performance practices that sought to redefine the body in relation to physical objects.


Location

TRENTO

ANSELM FRANKE/HILA PELEG: "THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)"

PALAZZO DELLE POSTE, VIA S.S. TRINITA’ 27, I-38100 TRENTO, ITALY

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