Speakers: Maria Hassabi with Aram Moshayedi (Hammer Museum)
This artist conversation was presented as part of New Circuits: Curating Contemporary Performance, an invitational curatorial research convening focused on pressing areas of inquiry facing the field of curating contemporary performance. New Circuits was held at the Walker Art Center September 28 and 29, 2015, and was made possible by a curatorial fellowship grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
How can a work of dance be collected by a museum? How, why, and to what ends can a museum collection support interdisciplinary artworks that stem from performances? What opportunities and limitations do such works present to the artist and institution? Pavel Pyś considers acquisitions of works by Maria Hassabi, Jason Moran, Joan Jonas, Meredith Monk, and Carolee Schneemann that have each presented unique questions, challenging and opening new ways for the Walker to approach collecting.
Occupying a space between live performance and visual art, artist/choreographer Maria Hassabi’s work explores stillness and sustained motion. At the Walker in February 2017 to present STAGING, a new dance work performed in the galleries of Merce Cunningham: Common Time, she discussed her sculptural movement installations examine the tension between the human form and the artistic object.
