DUBLIN.- IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, will present a new performance installation by New York based Sweat Variant, the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, acclaimed for their highly experimental, formally inventive cross-disciplinary work, who will present my tongue is a blade, on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June 2025 from 2pm to 5pm, in the Chapel at IMMA.
my tongue is a blade, is a three-hour durational movement practice that is a work with relation, memory, and reflection. It asks: What are the limits of our attention and how does that test the strength of our bonds? Three performers commit to remembering each other, holding each other, bearing each other, and sustaining the world that contains them. This rich visual and sonic landscape is an invitation to the audience to witness this practice and resonate within it.
This new piece continues themes of embodied inheritance also explored in Sweat Variant’s acclaimed let slip, hold sway and adaku trilogy. With a confluence of middles and beginnings, but no end, a movement moves in difference across the bodies of the performers. my tongue is a blade will be performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, NY based performer Bria Bacon, and Dublin-based performer Alessandra Azeviche.
The artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born are partners in their work and their lives. Since 1996, as Sweat Variant, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theatre, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true centre through the exploration of Black interiority.
The Sweat Variant performances are supported by the Sam Gilliam Foundation. The Sam Gilliam Foundation is a primary resource on the pioneering abstract artist Sam Gilliam and carries his legacy forward by supporting visual artists who, like Gilliam, push boundaries and grapple with the pressing issues of our time. IMMA is presenting for the first time in Ireland a solo exhibition by Sam Gilliam (1933 – 2022), one of the great innovators in post-war American painting. The exhibition Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields runs at IMMA from 13 June 2025 to 25 January 2026.
To coincide with the performance and the Sam Gilliam exhibition, Sweat Variant will screen two films swallow the moon and looking, on Living Canvas at IMMA, Europe’s largest digital art screen, from 5 to 18 June on the front lawn at IMMA.
Sweat Variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. They are partners in their work and their lives. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority.
Okpokwasili and Born are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, in which both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. They build gestural vocabularies and narrative frameworks that are concerned with the problem of memory in the inherent instability of the construction of a persona. They hope to activate a space that allows the audience to question who they are looking at, and how they are looking. They hope this creates a critical space of wonderment, of uncertainty, and of mystery. It is in this space that they believe we can see each other anew.
Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a performing artist, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include the Bessie Award-winning Pent-up: A Revenge Dance, the Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic, as well as Poor People’s TV Room, when I return who will receive me, Adaku’s Revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head, and adaku, part 1: the road opens. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum (NYC), Witchhunt at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. Commissions include the performance on the way, undone at the High Line in NYC and at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, the film Returning for Danspace Project, the site-specific performance swallow the moon at Jacob’s Pillow, and a new 2024 commission from Little Island as part of its commitment to supporting original work.
Her work has been presented at such venues as the Walker Art Center, Performance Space New York, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, BAM, and New York Live Arts. She has worked with film and theater directors Carrie Mae Weems, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Mika Rottenberg, Mahyad Tousi, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, Annie Dorsen, and Peter Born. Okpokwasili is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Okpokwasili was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA.) She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023.
Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, with whom he has created the installation turn, return at the Doris Duke Foundation (2024), repose without rest without end in Trondheim (2021), swallow the moon at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), on the way, undone at the High Line (2021), Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO) installation at the New Museum and the Hammer Museum (2021), Sitting on a Man’s Head (2019) at Danspace Project, Adaku’s Revolt (2019) at Abrons Arts Center, Poor People’s TV Room (2017), when I return, who will receive me (2016), Bronx Gothic (The Oval) (2014), Bronx Gothic (2013), and pent-up: a revenge dance (2009). Born and Okpokwasili also produced an album, day pulls down the sky, in 2019. Their work has also appeared in the Berlin Biennale and at the Tate Modern, London. Born has collaborated with David Thomson as a director, designer, and writer on The Venus Knot (2017) and he his own mythical beast (2018), and as a set designer for Nora Chipaumire’s rite/riot (2014) and El Capitan Kinglady (2016). His work Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO), created in collaboration with Okpokwasili, is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. Four of his collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance (Bessie) Awards.
His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. Born is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker, and furniture designer.
