Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Oxford
One of the Things That Makes Me Doubt
A new 16mm film called One of the Things That Makes Me Doubt (2010-2011) was premiered in a monographic survey exhibition of Daria Martin's work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which comprised seven research-driven film works spanning twelve years of film-making. One of the Things That Makes Me Doubt was created with proceeds from the £70,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize, which was awarded to Martin in 2009. At 32 minutes it is Martin's longest and most comprehensive film to date and explores the relationship between Martin's body of film work and her late grandmother's dream diaries. Entries from the diaries, read out by performers featured in her previous films, are matched with relevant outtakes from prior films, previously unused and here given new meaning. The piece represents a fantastical and spiralling study on the links between the performativity of dreaming and on cinema as an impossible act of witnessing. The other works in the exhibition - In the Palace (2000), Birds (2001), Soft Materials (2004), Wintergarden (2005), Harpstrings and Lava (2007) and Minotaur (2009) - comprised most of the films whose outtakes are recycled and re-narrated in One of the Things That Makes Me Doubt. The exhibition was accompanied by an 80-page catalogue with essays by Juliana Engberg and Jennifer Higgie, a contribution by Hélène Cixous and an interview between the artist and Etel Adnan (ISBN 978-0-9871732-9-4).