AN EXACTNESS: MARIA HASSABI

MARIA HASSABI LEVERAGES SLOWNESS IN HER PERFORMANCE ART, BLURRING TIME AND SPACE AND SOUND TO OVERRIDE REALITY.

Interview by Katya Tylevich

Introduction by Magnus Edensvard

Maria Hassabi’s performances, whether encountered in an exhibition space or unexpectedly on a museum staircase, often evoke the sensation of recalling a memory that you cannot be sure belongs to you. It’s the strangest thing. The sensation of waiting for something always seems to emerge—though exactly what for remains elusive. While anticipating movement, repetition, or perhaps the sound of a voice, a heightened state of unease sets in, as the passage of time becomes quietly, hypnotically blurred. The experience, at times, verges on the unbearable. Yet, one remains standing by, waiting—perhaps for an instruction or a sense of connection to make itself present. As you observe, your attention is soon intuitively redirected inward. And when even the most fleeting sense of reassurance remains absent, the impulse to either speak or leave takes over, as if plotting some kind of escape. Although the choreography in Maria’s performances slowly shifts and loops, punctuated by long moments of stillness, the point of view of the onlooker oscillates in mere seconds. Time, movement, and memory become so heightened that assessing these impulses, albeit in hindsight, remains akin to an urgent necessity.

Having had the privilege of knowing Maria and experiencing many of her extraordinary performances over the past 15 years—from the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2015, and most recently, I’ll Be Your Mirror at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong in 2023—I have witnessed, with curiosity, the evolution of her practice. Her impeccably stylized choreography, installations, and related sculptures, paintings, and photographic works have gradually emerged as organic extensions of her original vision. However, it was during a November afternoon in Hong Kong, as I revisited Maria’s practice at Tai Kwun, that my thoughts turned to tracing her work back to its earlier stages. A year later, I asked the inimitable arts and fiction writer, Katya Tylevich—who has conducted more artist interviews than anyone I can think of—to join me in unraveling these questions and reflections. What follows is an intimate conversation between Katya and Maria, discussing the artist’s unique performance practice, its origins, how it has evolved over the years, and what may yet come—untangling the web of questions and memories I was trying to recall.

KATYA TYLEVICH: You have a strong academic background in dance. You studied performance and choreography at CalArts and at the Merce Cunningham Studios in the mid ’90s. So, when you were just starting, did you have romantic ideas of becoming a museum artist? What did you want to do

MARIA HASSABI: I knew early on that I wanted to make my own work.

KT: In what capacity?

MH: The format didn’t really matter. I wanted to create my own world. I began with dance and choreography. Creating live performances was my main focus. The works gradually evolved towards creating installations for my performances, and then organically to creating sculptures, photographic works, paintings, and films. No matter the medium I use, the body—its relation to time and space—is my main material, and this is the core of choreography. My choreographic works are used as a departure when I create the photographic and sculptural works, and I employ technological tools to override the limitations that exist within the format of liveness and realness.

KT: Time, space… What about music? With your study of dance, is music a component of your work?

MH: Yes. Music is indeed important to me, though I tend to refer to it as “sound” and “sound design.” In general, I work closely with all my collaborators. I have been working with the same composer, Stavros Gasparatos, for the past seven years, and I look forward to working with him for many more. For the creation of each sound piece, we work side by side. We often use materials taken from the everyday rather than beats: the sound of cars, streets—and we do lots of live recordings, as well. Throughout the years, we’ve also used ready-made materials, such as short clips from movie themes or pop songs.

Once we gather the material for the particular work, we then begin a process that is similar to my choreographic process. We use long fades that we treat meticulously. This distorts the original material until it becomes unrecognizable.

This detailed way of working on the fades is also carried through when making the lighting design for my stage works, paintings, and photographic and sculptural works. My understanding of the principles of choreography is transferred across all the mediums I work on, even when time is extracted, which is the case with static works. The fades are mirrored by an image that is stretched out till it’s pixelated or blurred and thus again distorted, escaping its origins.

KT: Is it fair to say the music is there to accentuate the body’s pacing, rhythm, and timing?

MH: There is no rhythm in my work. Not in the traditional way we understand or expect rhythm.

KT: Oh?

MH: In my performances, I’m dealing with images. I chose to use stillness to capture representations, and deceleration as a way of moving from one image to the next. These are my tools, along with an aesthetic precision. This procedure, in its nature, is not rhythmical per se. I would say the works become rather hypnotic, and to other viewers, very stressful due to its minimalist approach which is perceived very differently when the works are time-based.

KT: About that—about the body. I love one story you tell: In 2015, you are performing PLASTIC [at the Hammer Museum]. You lie down and very, very slowly slide and move your body along the dramatic staircase there. It’s a disturbing vision—as if you’ve fallen. You observed that, every day, a different visitor would see you and yell, “Call 911!”

MH: Indeed, something like that. There are lots of anecdotes that occurred during my live installations. Live installations are the performative works I create and present within museum and exhibition spaces. These works reformat the principles of a theatrical performance into an exhibition that span days, weeks, or months, and adapt their duration to the public hours of the hosted institution. My live installations move uncannily between forms—sculpture, photography, the digital loop—and are characterized by sculptural physicality, stillness, and quietness, working against our sense of time.

PLASTIC was a live installation and a big part of it took place on staircases. Staircases in general are transitional spaces, and within museum buildings, artworks are rarely exhibited there. I understand the reactions of people. Especially because the dancers on the stairs are not visibly moving at all times. Rather, you catch them in a stretch-out pose. In 'stillness.' Stillness is what makes people nervous. “Are they real? If so, there must be something wrong with them.” Controlled movement, even if it’s slow, doesn’t make people worry. Slow movement is easy to make fun of.

KT: In these works, you—the performer, the dancer—move in a calculated, rational manner. But for the viewer, it’s an extremely irrational sight, with the possibility that an accident or act of violence has occurred. The viewer is disturbed. While the performer is—what? What is the performer experiencing

MH: The performer is completing a precise task, a choreography. It must be precise, partly because of the concepts and even the aesthetics I’m going after, but also because the choreography is based on a loop, which means one dancer will replace another at a scheduled time. When I first began working with the loop, there were many loose ends to the overall timing. With the years, I realized that an exactness was necessary. This exactness and precision I keep referring to is not about perfection; I’m not busy with perfection, as I’m dealing with human beings and not machines. Precision is about clarity of ideas. I’m dealing with an art form that is abstract in its nature and I have the need to be clear, first of all towards myself in order to understand what I’m putting on display.