“You’re confronted with someone lying in front of you as you walk up a staircase on your way to the galleries at The Museum of Modern Art. Is she asleep? Is she unconscious? She moves but remains prone and in your way. Do you help? Turn away? Stop and keep looking?
PLASTIC takes place in the transitional spaces of a museum known for its crowds, and the work can be seen from multiple vantage points, inverting the typical relationship between performer and viewer so that it is the dancer who appears static and the onlooker the one who moves. The live installation—a term Hassabi coined—is performed continuously during opening hours, reformatting the duration of a theatrical performance as a month-long museum exhibition. Hassabi’s work is filled with the tension between abjection and exaltation. The performers shift from one position to another, recalling images of repose, collapse, and transition. What unifies these figures is their unproductiveness: they are avatars of what appears to be a breakdown in a manufacturing chain. But just as their apparent stillness is an illusion, so is that of PLASTIC’s dancers—their seeming passivity is actually the result of physical attention and virtuosity. PLASTIC is animated by this kind of artifice. The work’s staginess is self-conscious, inviting spectacle in order to exhaust it. For example, the performers’ costumes of gray blouses and jeans, to which the collective threeASFOUR applied rhinestones, are both neutral and decorated, giving their glamor an evacuated feel. Likewise, the work neither embraces nor refuses narrative, instead prolonging the viewer’s perception of it. It is impossible to anticipate where it is going; instead you experience it as an accumulation of the here and now. PLASTIC thus sits uncannily between multiple mediums—photography, sculpture, the digital loop—as it circulates charged and associative images inspired by the world.” 
Thomas J. Lax

Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art

Performers: Hristoula Harakas, Maria Hassabi, Molly Lieber, Paige Martin, Oisín Monaghan, Michael Helland, Niall Jones, Tara Lorenzen and Mickey Mahar, Simon Courchel, Jessie Gold, Neil Greenberg, Elizabeth Hart, Kennis Hawkins, Shelley Senter, RoseAnne Spradlin and David Thomson
Sound design: Morten Norbye Halvorsen
Song fragments: Marina Rosenfeld
Styling: threeASFOUR
Produced by: Ash Bulayev
Artist assistant: Kate Ryan