Daria Martin: Tonight the World
The Curve, Barbican
Barbican Centre
Silk St, London EC2
 

Tonight the World is part of Life Rewired season that will run at the Curve throughout 2019, addressing “what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.”

In 2005 British-US video artist Daria Martin came across a 20,000-page archive of her just departed grandmother’s, artist Susi Stiassni’s, dream diaries, which contained around 40,000 dreams Stiassini had forensically recorded over a 35-year period from the 1970s onwards as an exercise of psychoanalysis. What brought about such obsessive and extreme introspection?

The Stiassnis lived in Brno (former Czechoslovakia) in a villa commissioned by Martin’s great-grandfather Alfred Stiassni — a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer — and designed by the famous Brno architect Ernst Wiesner. It was built in 1927-1929 and was recently renovated and is part of the city’s architectural heritage, which includes the legendary villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe.