Admission Free, No booking required, All welcome
Location: Gallery 2

Maria Hassabi will perform on the museum-style bench, already installed in the gallery. She takes a seat and gazes at her audience. The gold mirror surfaces of the bench and the surrounding plinths, reflect her movements and include glimpses of the viewers. Her routine begins with shuffling from one place of pause to the next, materialising uncomfortable and even contorted positions. Twists and turns occur on top, underneath and around the bench, finding an entangled body on a seemingly endless loop.  A quest for rest, for a place to be, to become, to breathe.

About the artist
Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) is an artist and choreographer working with live performance, installation, sculpture, photography and video. Since the early 2000s she has developed a unique artistic practice based on the relationship between the live body, the still image, and the sculptural object. Hassabi’s works reflect on concepts of time and the human figure, while employing a variety of media to emphasize the complexity of formal organization. Her photographic and video works use her live performances as a departure point, while the use of technology is employed to override the limitations that occur within the format of liveness and realness.

Admission Free, No booking required, All welcome
Location: Formal Gardens

Slipped, Part 2 (2024) is a scripted performance work that features actors and a saxophone player. In a looping sequence, the intricate staging and choreography reveal a complex interplay and overlay of ideas around health, leisure, emotion and the body that are amplified by the rhythmic and pathos-infused script.1 The actors create intimate moments of dialogue touching on ideas of therapeutic infrastructures, tourism and the body as an archive. These moments are set to a live musical score performed by a saxophone player. This project stems from Freeman’s research into sites of failed and poorly designed civic architecture, and how these sites can negatively impact our health and leisure pursuits.  

Slipped, Part 2 at IMMA follows on from its original presentation as a site-specific response to the former public baths at Naylor’s Cove, Bray with Mermaid Arts Centre (June 2022). This presentation marks a new iteration in response to the grounds at IMMA.

About the artist
Lisa Freeman’s recent exhibitions and screenings include: Approx 1 Second of a Sweet Kiss, solo exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery + Studio’s (2024), Hook, Spill, Cry Your Eyes Out, as part of Súitú, aemi Touring Programme, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden (2023). Freeman holds a Three Year Studio Membership at TBG+S. Her work is held in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection. 

Admission Free, No booking required, All welcome
Location: Formal Gardens

Developments in mathematics and astronomy were foundational for how formal gardens were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The formal garden at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, reconstructed on the basis of John Evelyn’s ‘ideal’ classical layout from 1664, bears the traces of the intersection between ideas of gardening and a scientific perspective of an orderly universe, one which trusts human knowledge to provide reliable facts about a law-abiding world. Through movement, sound and a series of colourful geometrical objects, the performance will displace the symmetrical structures of carefully tended vegetation onto unexpected cosmic routes. The stability of circular shrubs is disturbed by hypothetical cosmic objects, the balance of triangular trees is affected by imaginary devices and the straight walking paths veer to trajectories beyond everyday experience.

About the artist
Irina Gheorghe works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, collage, photography or video, to address the tensions inherent in researching things beyond observation. Irina also works as part of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, a project co-founded in 2009 to investigate how passions shape contemporary society.