HERE by Maria Hassabi
With Elena Antoniou, Maria Hassabi, Michael Helland, Alice Heyward, Oisín Monaghan, and Robert Steijn

Secession May 14 to June 20, 2021 (Vienna)
OGR February 24 to March 27, 2022 (Turin)

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.

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

Sound design: Stavros Gasparatos, Maria Hassabi
Outfits: Victoria Bartlett
Architectural Study: Maria Maneta, Maria Hassabi
Production Management: Eva Theofanidou, Natasha Katerinopoulos