LONDON.- Daria Martin has won the 2018 Film London Jarman Award, it was announced this evening at a special event at London’s Barbican Centre.

Daria Martin works across moving image and performance. Her enigmatic films mix the naturalistic with the surreal, creating multisensory spaces of the imagination. Her subject matter has ranged from her grandmother’s dream diaries to working with robots, choreographers and card magic. Her works are beautifully composed with an ethereal quality and an aesthetic that moves from cinema to 1960s instructional film. She has frequently worked in collaboration with scientists and has twice won Wellcome Trust awards.

In her 2017 work A Hunger Artist, Martin retells Kafka’s 1922 short story. Set in a fantastical Victorian fairground it is a macabre tale of a sideshow artist who joins the circus, and having performed for unappreciative and doubtful spectators, ends up dying neglected. Her work At The Threshold (2014 – 2015) is one of a series of films that explores the rare condition of mirror-touch synaesthesia. People with this neurological condition feel a palpable sensation of touch on their own bodies when they see another person, or even an object, being touched.

Daria Martin has shown work at the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and The Wellcome Collection, London, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She will be having a solo show at the Barbican Centre Curve Gallery in 2019.

Daria Martin was born in 1973 in San Francisco, USA and now lives in London. She has won numerous awards and her work is held in a number of public and private collections including Arts Council England, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Whitney Museum, New York.

Daria Martin receives £10,000 prize money.

The 2018 Film London Jarman Award was presented by Olivia Laing. Olivia Laing is an acclaimed writer and journalist. In 2014 Laing received the Eccles British Library Writer Award and in 2018 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Daria Martin was chosen from a distinguished shortlist of artists featuring Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Jasmina Cibic, Lawrence Lek, Hardeep Pandhal and Margaret Salmon.

Adrian Wootton, Chief Executive of Film London and the British Film Commission said: “I am delighted that the 11th Film London Jarman Award will honour the work of Daria Martin, whose long-running practice has seen her constantly challenge herself, creating an eclectic and expansive body of work that has explored everything from dreams and mythology to technology and feminism. The past 11 years have seen a significant rise in audiences for artists’ filmmaking, and it is important to recognise Martin’s considerable contribution to this shift in the popularity and ubiquity of the medium.”

The Jarman Award, established in 2008, celebrates the diversity and creativity of artists working in film today, and is run in partnership with Whitechapel Gallery, Channel 4 and Genesis Cinema.

Nominated by experts across the UK film and contemporary art sectors, the Jury who selected this year’s shortlist are: Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator, International Art (Film), Tate Modern and Film London Board Member; Catherine Bray, Editor, Random Acts, Channel 4; Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, Whitechapel Gallery; Melanie Manchot, Artist; Skinder Hundal, Chief Executive, New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Tyrone Walker-Hebborn, Director, Genesis Cinema.

Previous winners include - Luke Fowler (2008), Lindsay Seers (2009), Emily Wardill (2010), Anya Kirschner & David Panos (2011), James Richards (2012), John Smith (2013), Ursula Mayer (2014) Seamus Harahan (2015) and Heather Phillipson (2016), Oreet Ashery (2017).