Maria Hassabi
HERE

Curated by Samuele Piazza with Nicola Ricciardi

Commissioned by Secession and Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, and co-produced with OGR Torino and Onassis Foundation, Athens

With the support of Milvus Artistic Research Center (MARC), Knislinge, and Onassis Stegi, Athens

The live installation HERE invites visitors to share time and presence with six dancers.
During the month-long exhibition, six dancers will perform a choreography that unfolds at a decelerated pace within a sculptural environment.
The movements of the performers will be backed by a sound composition, a female voice counting every passing second, from 1 to 14399, underlining the eternal succession of time. Immersed in this constant continuum, the dancers’ movements create a situation of everchanging presence unveiling the slippery nature of the “here and now.”

Since the early 2000s, Maria Hassabi has created a unique choreographic practice focused on stillness and the empty space in-between movements.
In her works, the artist takes cues from conventions, hierarchies, and codes common to theater, museums, and public spaces, which she then reworks to reflect the given contexts and develops in dialogue with a site’s unique architecture.
At the core of Hassabi’s choreographies, stillness and deceleration are used both as techniques and as subjects of representation, while the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image.

Performers: Elena Antoniou, Maria Hassabi, Michael Helland, Alice Heyward, Oisín Monaghan, Robert Steijn.
Sound design: Stavros Gasparatos, Maria Hassabi
Outfits: Victoria Bartlett
Architectural Study: Maria Maneta, Maria Hassabi
Production Management: Eva Theofanidou, Natasha Katerinopoulos

BIOGRAPHY
Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) is an artist and choreographer working with live performance, installation, sculpture, photography and video. Her works have been presented worldwide in theaters, festivals, museums, galleries and public spaces including Secession (Vienna); Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis); Centre Pompidou (Paris); K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Museum of Modern Art(New York); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art(Melbourne); Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva); The Kitchen, New York, amongst others. Her works have also been featured in group exhibitions such as documeta14 (Kassel); Performa (New York); 55th Venice Biennale. Hassabi has received the 2019 Performa Malcolm McClaren Award; a 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award; 2015 Herb Alpert Award; 2012 President’s Award for Performing Arts from LMCC; 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship; 2009 Grants to Artists Award from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and is an Onassis Decade Resident 2019-2029. She’s based in NY and Athens and works internationally.