Maria Hassabi: I’ll Be Your Mirror

Tai Kwun Contemporary presents I’ll Be Your Mirror, the first solo exhibition of the artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi in Asia. Maria Hassabi brings her practice of choreography, sound, sculpture, photography, and painting with two interconnected live installations: White Out, in the large gallery, and I’ll Be Your Mirror, after which the exhibition is titled, in the smaller gallery.

In her signature choreographic style, defined by sculptural physicality, stillness, and quietness, Maria Hassabi confronts image—the image of the dancer and that of the viewer, and the images that surface in the actual space in a scheme of reflections on gold mirroring objects.

White Out is covered in a white carpet, showered in bright white light. Two identical gold mirror benches are placed deliberately to face the surrounding walls, as though they were typical museum benches intended for visitors to view the art on the walls. Yet the walls are empty. A single dancer installed on a bench embodies a sculpturesque physicality; small white speakers are scattered around the room and a large photograph is draped over one of the plinths. Reflections occur on the mirror surfaces across the space, portraying partial body parts of the dancer, the viewers, and the installation.

I’ll Be Your Mirror accelerates the work’s orientation to the image through the calculated use of mirrors, where large and small strips of gold mirror panels cover the walls and floors, multiplying the dancer’s image, making the plurality of the self and its distorted reflections apparent. The dancer takes on multiple forms, overlapping with the reflections of visitors who step into the frame of the work and are (in)voluntarily exhibited as art subjects, beyond their intentional role as viewers.

The artist proposes an alternative to the way we perceive ourselves and those around us. She invites us to ponder the plasticity of our own image, one that is similar to the fleeting nature of dance—elusive, subject to our impression unless documented, which in turn is devoid of its liveness, and thus its realness. 

The works in I’ll Be Your Mirror recover a sensitivity redacted by our hybrid ways of receiving and processing visual information today—where we listen but do not hear, watch but do not see. This separation of body and mind, space and time, reflects a schizophrenic state of being, a corporeal responsiveness hijacked by digital existence. With the artist’s high-tension choreographic works evolving throughout the duration one spends in the space, the work shifts the dynamics between the dancer and the spectator, spurring on the questions: What is it that we are looking at? 

Curated by Xue Tan with Louiza Ho.

Dancers: 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 

Maria Hassabi: I’ll Be Your Mirror is the latest exhibition of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s live art programming. This series of exhibitions commissions and features artists who work at the intersection of visual art, performance, moving image, music, and sound. Previous exhibitions have presented artists such as Pan Daijing, Tino Sehgal, Scarlet Yu & Xavier Le Roy, Nile Koetting, Mette Edvardsen and Eisa Jocson.