Daria Blum: HOME SCREEN

Daria Blum’s practice (*1992 Lucerne, CH) moves between performative interventions and tragicomic narratives, unfolding within installative environments in which screens, spotlights, live streams, and self-absorbed, competitive characters—appearing as different iterations of her own persona—share, or rather fight over, the stage. In her work, audiovisual installation stands on equal footing with staged performance, at times even determining it. Established hierarchies—such as those between performance and its documentation, or between the artist and her props—are overturned; Blum redistributes her directive agency among common objects and technological surfaces, which together orchestrate situations in which everyday and artistic performativity is humourously brought into focus. While the artist’s visual presence—whether in person or in image—is a constant throughout her practice, there is no trace of her face or body in the site-specific intervention realised at marytwo. In HOME SCREEN, lamps, projections, screens, and a series of framed works are quite literally the sole actors in a bodiless play. "While trying to train my attention span against senseless feeds, I start focusing on a flickering side lamp in my living room. The event lasts longer and longer, becomes unsettling, then pathetic: what does this lamp want from me? I turn it off and the aggressive main light takes over, leaves me hanging in a shifted, cold atmosphere." The installation’s props of assembled lamps and screens are generically familiar: objects without a distinctive design identity, mass-produced to artificially determine the ambience of interior spaces. Here, they are staged precisely as such, asserting their presence and claiming theatricality through a calibrated sonic and visual choreography of on-and-off switching, punctuated by sudden yet charmingly melodic synth keys that divide the installation into chapters. A roaming spotlight screens and frames every detail, and as elements of the scenery are alternately assigned the performing roles, shared notions of singular personality and perspective are disrupted. Was the flickering lamp trying to communicate with me? Does it see me? I find a thread on Reddit about the universally cathartic quality of ABBA’s 1981 song Slipping Through My Fingers: “someone needs to study how slipping through my fingers immediately sets off the waterworks!” “This song is like the brown note but for your tears – no idea how, but even after listening to it for the thousandth time i still get goosebumps.” There is something reassuring as well as embarrassing in thinking that we all are so equivalently moved by certain chord progressions and melodies. Among the other characters in this show is a series of framed works in a 16:9 format. These are assemblages composed of layered trials and materials used for stage productions: the imperfect lettering of a script, chaotic cables, coloured gel foils – a performative archive that evoke the stages of an eternally unfinished artistic process, as well as its emotional layers. The images also unfold in layers across the walls, where screens merge with the background and become projection surfaces themselves, creating a pleasant sense of disorientation. I observe the bulb that has stopped flickering. I watch it for a long time now; it blinds me and acquires a new quality as a circle of light: the spotlight, the moon, the sun. It reminds me of the magnificence of Tillmans’s Sun and Venus. The magic formula by which, with enough attention, any banal thing can appear spectacular. From the setting and perspective of marytwo’s interior, HOME SCREEN choreographs our attention as an audience. It is very much a spectacle—precisely monitored—that unfolds between crescendos and moments of calm, deploying musical pathos through unexceptional objects. The composition revolves around a recognisable melody, sometimes approaches a climax, triggering shared emotional reactions, then retreats again. Yet the characters continue their ostentatious “look-at-me!!” dance, tragicomically performing and re-performing their same role according to the artist’s programming, in a ridiculous quest for attention, even when the space is closed. This sad funniness becomes strangely relatable in the desire to stand out within our own genericness. As characterless machines permeate more and more aspects of human life, at what point do generic lamps and attention seeking props start to steal the show? Monica Unser