IMMA presents a new performance installation by award winning Sweat Variant, the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born

IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is excited to present a new performance installation by New York based Sweat Variant, the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, acclaimed for their highly experimental, formally inventive cross-disciplinary work, who will present my tongue is a blade, on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June 2025 from 2pm to 5pm, in the Chapel at IMMA.

my tongue is a blade is a three-hour durational movement practice that is a work with relation, memory, and reflection. It asks: What are the limits of our attention and how does that test the strength of our bonds? Three performers commit to remembering each other, holding each other, bearing each other, and sustaining the world that contains them. This rich visual and sonic landscape is an invitation to the audience to witness this practice and resonate within it.

This new piece continues themes of embodied inheritance also explored in Sweat Variant’s acclaimed let slip, hold sway and adaku trilogy. With a confluence of middles and beginnings, but no end, a movement moves in difference across the bodies of the performers. my tongue is a blade will be performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, NY based performer Bria Bacon, and Dublin-based performer Alessandra Azeviche.

The artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born are partners in their work and their lives. Since 1996, as Sweat Variant, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theatre, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true centre through the exploration of Black interiority.

The Sweat Variant performances are supported by the Sam Gilliam Foundation. The Sam Gilliam Foundation is a primary resource on the pioneering abstract artist Sam Gilliam and carries his legacy forward by supporting visual artists who, like Gilliam, push boundaries and grapple with the pressing issues of our time. IMMA is presenting for the first time in Ireland a solo exhibition by Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), one of the great innovators in post-war American painting. The exhibition Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields runs at IMMA from 13 June 2025 to 25 January 2026.

To coincide with the performance and the Sam Gilliam exhibition, Sweat Variant will screen two films swallow the moon and looking, on Living Canvas at IMMA, Europe’s largest digital art screen, from 5 to 18 June on the front lawn at IMMA.

For media inquiries and images, please contact:
Monica Cullinane E: [email protected] T: 086 2010023 
Patrice Molloy E: [email protected] T: 086 2009957

20 May 2025

ENDS

Additional Information

Sweat Variant, my tongue is a blade
Date: Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 June 2025
Time: 2pm – 5pm daily, performance starts at 2pm.
Venue: The Chapel, IMMA
Tickets: Tickets: Admission is free. Two entry time slots are available at 2pm and 3:30pm. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after their chosen entry slot and stay for as long as they like. Advance booking is recommended.
Performance details: Each durational performance is three hours long, and we encourage audiences to come and go throughout the piece. Entry is rolling through the duration of the installation, and space is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Further details and booking: Sweat Variant Performance – IMMA

About Sweat Variant
Sweat Variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. They are partners in their work and their lives. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority.

Okpokwasili and Born are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, in which both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. They build gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks that are concerned with the problem of memory in the inherent instability of the construction of a persona. They hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at, and how they are looking. They hope this creates a critical space of wonderment, of uncertainty, and of mystery. It is in this space that they believe we can see each other anew.

About the artists

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a performing artist, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include the Bessie Award-winning Pent-up: A Revenge Dance, the Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic, as well as Poor People’s TV Room, when I return who will receive me, Adaku’s Revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head, and adaku, part 1: the road opens. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum (NYC), Witchhunt at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. Commissions include the performance on the way, undone at the High Line in NYC and at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, the film Returning for Danspace Project, the site-specific performance swallow the moon at Jacob’s Pillow, and a new 2024 commission from Little Island as part of its commitment to supporting original work.

Her work has been presented at such venues as the Walker Art Center, Performance Space New York, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, BAM, and New York Live Arts. She has worked with film and theater directors Carrie Mae Weems, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Mika Rottenberg, Mahyad Tousi, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, Annie Dorsen, and Peter Born. Okpokwasili is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA.) She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023.

Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, with whom he has created the installation turn, return at the Doris Duke Foundation (2024), repose without rest without end in Trondheim (2021), swallow the moon at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), on the way, undone at the High Line (2021), Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO) installation at the New Museum and the Hammer Museum (2021), Sitting on a Man’s Head (2019) at Danspace Project, Adaku’s Revolt (2019) at Abrons Arts Center, Poor People’s TV Room (2017), when I return, who will receive me (2016), Bronx Gothic (The Oval) (2014), Bronx Gothic (2013), and pent-up: a revenge dance (2009). Born and Okpokwasili also produced an album, day pulls down the sky, in 2019. Their work has also appeared in the Berlin Biennale and at the Tate Modern, London. Born has collaborated with David Thomson as a director, designer, and writer on The Venus Knot (2017) and he his own mythical beast (2018), and as a set designer for Nora Chipaumire’s rite/riot (2014) and El Capitan Kinglady (2016). His work Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO), created in collaboration with Okpokwasili, is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. Four of his collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance (Bessie) Awards.

His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. Born is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker, and furniture designer.

For more information about Sweat Variant / Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, visit www.sweatvariant.com.

About the Performers

Okwui Okpokwasili as above.

Bria Bacon is a performing artist, predominantly trained in dance, holding passions and gifts in writing, theatre, sound-making and singing. She has worked with Bebe Miller Company, Stefanie Batten Bland, ChameckiLerner, Wendell Gray II, Sally Silvers, Donna Uchizono, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Stephen Petronio Company, and Kyle Marshall Choreography, as well as Beth Gill and Rachel Comey in NYFW and Company Christoph Winkler in Berlin. Currently, she is working with Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group and Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born), among others. All praise to the angels, ancestors, and folx within her village.

Alessandra Azeviche is a Dublin-based Bahia-born dance artist who has been breaking boundaries in Ireland since 2018. A leading Afro-Brazilian artist connecting ancestral movements to a contemporary approach. Founder of the multicultural, counter-colonial Afro-Brazilian community Quilombo Terra in 2022, Azeviche also sits on the board of Dublin Dance Festival. Her acclaimed solo debut ‘Terra’ was performed at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2024, nominated for two Fringe awards. She has also performed in Irish Modern Dance Theatre shows, and as part of Hot Brown Honey at Dublin Fringe 2022. Azeviche is increasingly working in contemporary arts performance, dealing with themes of counter colonization and intersectionality.

Living Canvas at IMMA screening swallow the moon and looking
5 – 18 June 2025, Living Canvas at IMMA – IMMA

swallow the moon
swallow the moon is the second in a series of lamentations that mark the rupture between a precolonial West African body and the charged space of identity within a contemporary Black body. At the heart of this epic song is a mother’s wail with the gravitational force of generations. It signals a mother’s grief for a lost daughter. Her cries are doubled in embodied shadows that gather around her–cries so loud, with a mouth going so wide, she would swallow the world.Conceived, composed and performed by Okwui Okpokwasili with additional collaboration by Lucia Betelou, Willow Green, Julianna Massa, Adriana Ogle
Headpieces designed by Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili. Scenic elements and audio design by Peter Born.

looking
looking is part of the installation for a larger work, called poor people’s tv room (solo)
In his novel “Foreign Gods Inc.” by Okey Ndibe, the main character visits a friend of his in his hometown in Nigeria. His friend has become rich, and his way of sharing that wealth with the community was to build an extra living room to his house, where people could come and sit in the air conditioning and watch old Michael Jordan videos. He called it a “poor people’s tv room” and that inspired the title of this work—this idea of providing a room where someone else’s aspirations were always on a loop, a space set “alongside time,” rather than in it.

Inspired by the events of the Woman’s War of 1929 in southeastern Nigeria, the “Bring Back Our Girls Movement” in 2014 and the movement for Black Lives (BLM) in the US in 2014, this work considers how protest movements are durational acts. These acts transmit embodied knowledge through generations and across continents, even when cultural histories have been suppressed. This work explores the relationship between these durational acts and performance practice.

This installation is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Created by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Cinematography by Iki Nakagawa.