Six dancers move at a measured pace within a landscape immersed in gold. Their bodies morph at imperceptible velocities creating various constellations as they alternate between representation and abstraction. Subtle lighting changes imitate the shifts of natural daylight, and an ambient sound score accentuates the unbroken time. A live installation occuring throughout the Vienna Secession’s opening hours invites its visitors to share the main exhibition hall with the performers.
Commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen and the Vienna Secession, TIMES allows time to slide into the boundless. Since the early 2000s, Maria Hassabi has carved a choreographic practice that concentrates on stillness, slowness and the in-betweenness of bodies in motion. Shepherding the languages and strategies of dance into the spaces of visual art across the globe, Hassabi decelerates movement until it folds upon definitions of sculpture and image, testing conventional rhythms of viewership.

A joint project of Wiener Festwochen and Vienna Secession