Mirror
Maria Hassabi has long pioneered live installations that explore the sculptural body, image-making, and the deceleration of time. Often featuring dancers moving at an almost imperceptible pace, her works confront visitors as living sculptures. By bringing the performing body into museums, theaters, and public spaces, she blurs the boundaries between visitors and performers, subjects and objects.
Maria Hassabi: I’ll Be Your Mirror was an exhibition and live installation commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong) in 2023. Combining performance, sound, photography, and painting, the work centered around the production of images using gold-dressed mirrors. These reflective surfaces played with the multiple meanings and representations of gold in both ancient and contemporary myths—whether as a color in divination, a symbol of capitalism, or a kitsch element in pop culture.
The paradox between gold’s immutability and the shifting perceptions of its representation mirrors the tensions within 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