Photographs: Maria Hassabi, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 2023. Live installations and exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
I’ll Be Your Mirror
Maria Hassabi has long pioneered live installations that explore the sculptural body, image-making, and the deceleration of time. Frequently involving dancers moving at a glacial, barely perceptible pace, Hassabi’s works confront visitors as living sculptures. Her works bring the performing body into museums, theatres, and public spaces, which shift the boundaries between visitors and performers, subjects and objects.
Maria Hassabi: I’ll Be Your Mirror is a new exhibition and live installation by Maria Hassabi commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong) comprising elements of performance, sound, photography and painting. I’ll Be Your Mirror gravitates around the production of image through the usage of mirrors dressed in gold, playing with the myriad meanings and representations of gold in ancient and contemporary myths—as a colour in divination, as a symbolic representation of capitalism, or even a kitsch sample from pop culture. The paradox between the immutability of gold and the shifting perceptions of its representation echoes the tensions in Hassabi’s practice—between subjects and objects, dance and sculpture, the live body and still images, the spectacular and the everyday.
CREDITS
Performers
Marah Arcilla
Elena Antoniou
Sylvie Cox
Li De
Maria Hassabi
Adam Russell Jones
Mickey Mahar
Tasos Nikas
Yuma Sylla
Sara Tan
Solong Zhang
Architectural Study
Maria Maneta
Maria Hassabi
Sound design
Stavros Gasparatos
Maria Hassabi
Clothing design
Victoria Bartlett
Venia Polyhronaki
Curated by
Xue Tan with Louiza Ho
Commissioned by
Tai Kwun Contemporary