By: Tim Jonze | Dancing naked with robots: dreams of Jarman prize winner Daria Martin | Neuroscience | The Guardian
Video art has never been more celebrated – and after taking the £10,000 prize for the best artist using moving images, the intriguing filmmaker is in the vanguard
For Daria Martin, making art is a dream come true – literally. Her films involve restaging the dreams, nightmares or altered states of consciousness of friends and relatives. For one forthcoming project, Tonight the World, she’s recreated several of her grandmother’s nocturnal visions. She fled the Nazis in 1938 and spent the rest of her life dreaming about the family home she was forced to abandon.
Even when Martin is not turning dreams into real life, her films have a dreamlike quality: crudely made robots dance away next to naked people; retro-futurist figures in white leotards strike poses among transparent plastic shapes. These investigations into the unconscious can be mesmerising – and no doubt cast a spell over the judges of the Film London Jarman awards, who crowned her the winner of this year’s £10,000 prize for art using moving images.
Related: The shock of the weird: cutting-edge video art – in pictures
