Dara Friedman

Dara Friedman makes exuberant films and videos works exploring notions of the spatial and emotional performance of an individual across public, urban, and private spaces. Always imbued with a poetic vibrance, her works often enlist dancers or actors to play out scenes ostensibly both documentary and fictional (in a similar way to the difference between strangers and partners). In these spaces, her subjects seem to make their meaning through movement. Combining techniques within both digital and film footage, sometimes doubling the same scene using both, with an attention toward the mechanisms of an artwork’s title or installation, Friedman also pays close heed to the potential for conceptual layering in her work. In an essay for Friedman’s exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Ann Ellegood accounts, “this constant push and pull between the intellectual and the sensual, between a state of control and a state of release, has become the primary preoccupation of her filmmaking over the past several years.” Born in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Friedman now lives and works in Miami, Florida. Her work has been the subject of numerous recent projects, including at venues such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Miami Art Museum, Florida; the Museum of Modern Art, New York;  The Kitchen, New York; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida among others. Friedman is represented in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York.