“A Hunger Artist” the new film by London-based artist Daria Martin is a complex, multi-layered artwork at the intersection of literature, psychology and science that experimentally adapts the modernist masterpiece “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (1924). Published in Kafka’s last days, the story is an ambiguous allegory about a public performer who fasts for weeks to the adulation of hundreds until he is left to perform for unappreciative spectators, and, ultimately, to barely please only himself, unto death.

The film “A Hunger Artist” (HD with sound, 16 minutes) highlights the contradictory human experience of our bodies as both ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ – as matter to be quantified and altered on the one hand and as a gateway to phenomenal, lived experience on the other. The Hunger Artist’s obsession with his clock and his impresario’s enumeration of fasting days can be likened to the broader cultural trends towards ‘datafication of the body’ (counting calories and steps, on a smartphone) and towards self-objectification through social media.