In their largest collaboration to date, Nairy Baghramian and Maria Hassabi presented Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre), an installation and live performances inhabiting two floors at 1014. Taking cues from the spatial qualities of the building, the two artists turned the domestic space into an intimate stage that probed the interplay of architecture and bodies while teasing out fantasies. 

Baghramian’s friendship with the late designer Janette Laverrière (1909–2011) layed the groundwork for Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre). Over the last decade before Laverrière’s passing, Baghramian and Laverrière together explored the designer’s archives to imagine new variations and reinterpretations, often with a playful take on assumed notions of design’s utilitarian function versus art’s autonomy. They also subtly engaged with the tacit gender coding of architecture (male) and interior design (female). Hence, Laverrière’s 1947 design of a greenroom titled Entre deux actes—Loge de comédienne, derided at the time as too “feminine,” was Baghramian’s starting point for a new installation titled Entre deux actes II (Loge des comédiennes), conceived in 2009 in close collaboration with Laverrière. With this new work, the two relished blurring the line between art and design even more by exhibiting a reimagined “boudoir” as an art installation. The work still awaited the implied “comédienne” though, so Baghramian included her personal collection of Carlo Mollino’s series of erotic Polaroid photographs. On the walls, in frames designed by Baghramian, women in extravagant clothing with wigs and accessories used for late-night private modeling sessions conjure a world of fantasies, even though the photos were staged in the concealed space of the Italian architect’s private home. With the inclusion of Mollino, Entre deux actes II (Loge des comédiennes) became a “ménage à trois.”

Hassabi joined this new chapter for Performa 19, and the work naturally became Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre). In Hassabi’s work, prolonged stillness over juxtaposed visual references often opens up rich associations that complicate the relationship between bodies and images. In what the choreographer calls a “velocity of deceleration,” Hassabi distills movement and stretches time to create liminal objects that sit across multiple mediums—dance, photography, sculpture. For Entre Deux Actes (Ménage à Quatre), Hassabi recomposed her most recent works, TOGETHER (2019) and FIGURES (2019), for the townhouse’s unique setting to produce an atmosphere where slowness and stillness intensify sensitivity.

Curated by Charles Aubin for Performa. Co-commissioned by Performa and 1014 and co-produced by The Kitchen, with additional support from Marian Goodman Gallery.

Press: Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Financial Times, Frieze, Monopol

Photos: Sara Blesener