Livestock: Viral – A Safe Place (Reconnect) by Olivia Hassett
Presented Online on 15 May 2021
Artist: Olivia Hasset
Curated by: Dr. Katherine Nolan and Francis Fay
In Association with: Bealtaine Festival
The second in a series of three live streamed performance art events with leading artists Olivia Hassett, Day Magee and El Putnam, exploring the vulnerability of the human body as part of an ecology both human and animal.
The pandemic puts a focus on the body, highlighting our frailties, forcing us to question our assumptions about who and what is vulnerable. With social distancing as the new norm we are propelled to create new forms of intimacy, social relations and endurance.
For this year’s Bealtaine Festival Olivia Hassett will share a new live artwork inspired by her experience of living in a body in a 5km world. Reconnect will explore the constraints and connections between her performing body and a sculptural installation specially constructed in her home studio.
About the Artist
Olivia Hassett, a Dublin based artist, creates live works, sculptures, and immersive installations. Her practice reflects her ongoing interest in collaboration and engages with scientific, medical and arts and health notions and methodologies. Central to Hassett’s practice is her exploration of the human body and its potential to manoeuvre between and among ideas of strength and fragility, the grotesque, and the sublime. Drawing from notions of skin as a porous boundary between the inside/ outside and public/ private body her live artworks probe these constantly shifting liminal spaces.
LIVESTOCK: Viral was curated and produced by Francis Fay & Dr. Katherine Nolan presented in partnership with Bealtaine Festival 2021.
