In “I’m So Disappointed In You,” Daria Blum turns video, music, text, and choreography into a live study of rivalry and desire—set between Berlin of the 2010s and Tate Modern’s liminal spaces.
Daria Blum’s multimedia live performance at Tate Modern arrives like a private message that refuses to stay private—part monologue, part argument, part duet.
First-person intimacy drives “I’m So Disappointed In You,” but it’s never straightforward.. Blum’s piece is built around alter egos—named Daphne. Dahlia. and Daisy—whose identities feel close enough to tug at the audience’s sympathy. and slippery enough to complicate it.. In Berlin during the 2010s, these characters collide: they converse, disagree, and move between different voices and mannerisms.. The result is less a single narrative than a choreography of near-matching selves. each one insisting on its own version of what happened.
At the center is an emotional proposition: female alliances, desire, rivalry—these are not separate categories but constantly shifting roles.. Blum doesn’t treat conflict as spectacle for its own sake.. Instead, she frames it as a form of social performance, the kind that emerges when attention, affection, and power overlap.. When characters “break character,” the work disrupts the expected contract between performer and viewer.. You’re not simply asked to watch; you’re asked to notice how watching itself becomes part of the interaction.
The mechanics of that noticing are both digital and physical.. Blum travels between electronic and physical spaces. using sampling. looping. and remixing what feels like digital debris—fragments that echo how contemporary intimacy is stored. replayed. and reinterpreted.. Video and on-screen text sit alongside music and choreographed movement. while recordings—like phone captures—carry the raw texture of everyday life.. Even the setting becomes an instrument.. Domestic props and lighting appear in live relation to the performer, turning the stage into a set of thresholds.
Those thresholds matter because Blum places the female characters in liminal locations: hostel lobbies, club toilets, and waiting rooms.. These are places where people perform versions of themselves that don’t quite fit—too transitional to be fully private. too exposed to be fully safe.. The performance’s insistence on these spaces makes the work feel culturally fluent.. It recognizes the modern rhythm of getting in. waiting. moving on. and trying again—often while carrying the friction of older tensions.
Part of the appeal is how literary and theatrical devices shape what could otherwise be a purely technological aesthetic.. “I’m So Disappointed In You” uses narrative tools—monologue. character doubling. the pressure of a first-person account—then pulls them apart.. The phone recordings and the remixing of captured fragments don’t just decorate the piece; they underline a theme about agency.. When experiences are recorded, they don’t simply preserve reality.. They alter it—compress it, edit it, and sometimes turn it into something that can be used against you.
This is where the work’s connection to Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern gains extra resonance.. Blum’s performance doesn’t only speak to the present condition of screens and fragments; it also echoes a longer cultural question about technology’s relationship to attention and identity.. The “before the internet” framing pushes the viewer to consider how experimental media thinking has long sought ways to complicate engagement—how artists have treated technology as a lens. not a background.. Blum’s “breaking character” becomes a contemporary continuation of that tradition. but with a sharpened social focus on alliances and rivalry.
For audiences, the lived impact is subtle but real.. The piece doesn’t ask you to judge characters from a distance; it draws you into the unstable space where people become both self and performance at the same time.. That instability can feel familiar: the way a message changes when it’s reread. the way a conversation rewrites itself in memory. the way rivalry can masquerade as admiration or affection.. Blum’s choreography of dispute and desire makes that mechanism visible. and in doing so. offers a form of cultural recognition—especially for viewers attuned to how women navigate rooms that demand a particular kind of composure.
There’s also an implicit future-facing implication: if identity is performed through media, then identity can be redesigned through media.. Blum’s use of looping and sampling suggests not a retreat into repetition, but a capacity to reframe.. “I’m So Disappointed In You” ends up functioning like a rehearsal for new ways of being together—where alliances are not fixed. rivalry is not only destructive. and desire doesn’t have to be trapped in a single storyline.