Title:
Spiritual Alignment, Gabriella Imrichova
Author:
Parker Lev Dupain
Date:
18.06.26

Shirtless beneath an oversized black blazer roughly sewn to an inverted counterpart, they scanned the room with their arms slightly raised and fingers splayed toward the floor. The cropped look recalled Timothée Chalamet’s conversation-forward fit at the 2022 Oscars, carrying with it a bolero-like bravado and the soft rebellion of a Ponyboy fantasy.1 The jacket was offset by sheer pantyhose and low-heeled Italian-leather Vic Matiés with an upturned toe. There was a disorientation to their movements, a kind of concentrated spatial locating—like returning home after a big night, to a once-familiar place that’s become impossible to navigate. Gabriella Imrichova leaned against the wall, then the floor, ear pressed to the ground, ass to the audience; brief flashes of fresh top-surgery scars and the gusset—the sole concession to bottom-half coverage—exposed socially derived rules of modesty that regulate a body. Imrichova’s uncertain comportment sat in tension with the unyielding confidence of their get-down-to-business jester outfit, Erin Brockovich–like messy updo, and the heavy staccato of their leather soles on the wooden floor, like a patrolling schoolteacher.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Early in our conversation, centred on their two-month residency at Temperance Hall and its public outcome in early November 2025, Spiritual Alignment—Imrichova cited Paul Cézanne.2

I was not anticipating an appearance of the “father of us all,” the progenitor of a Eurocentric, knee-jerk Modernism and a key player in that familiar art-historical rhythm that anxiously grasps for the new.3 His invocation triggers an unbidden outgassing of what is referred to as Western thought and its attempts to repair itself with itself—a logic that resonates with what Anna Kornbluh terms “too-late capitalism,” when capital fails to resolve the crisis of accumulation it has produced.4 Imrichova’s performances are not spared by this economy, nor do they seek to correct it through pedagogical critique or radical deconstruction, as many practices do. Rather, they hold open the anxieties it generates. Their work unfolds as a mode of searching that remains open to what might happen when questions are asked without the obligation of arriving at answers—questions that trace the delicate patterns of a thinking-body pacing through the fucked contemporaneity that we variously suffer.

In his short essay Cézanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that Cézanne “did not want to separate the stable things which we see from the shifting way they appear.”5 Unlike the Impressionists, whose palettes privileged light and atmospheric effects at the expense of fixed contours, Cézanne embraced the layering of warm colours and black to situate objects within perception, allowing form to emerge from colour rather than dissolve into atmosphere.6 In Cézanne, distortions only feel out of place when you isolate them; they begin to resemble what your eyes are already doing—making compromises, leaning, adjusting, unable to hold still. He does not give us a world already decided but one in negotiation, where seeing is not possession but participation, and perception becomes awareness through the body that perceives it.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Imrichova placed thirty-plus GUNDE IKEA folding chairs in rows that mirrored the seated audience—an action that comprised most of the performance. By retrieving each chair from backstage, they stretched the act of placement into something slow and thickened by repetition. At first, their gestus—part artist, part critic and for whom placement is never neutral and never quite finished—read as funny, a wry critique of the deliberation that often accompanies an artist’s installation; a process of minute shifts in placement, well known to the patience of technicians and gallery staff alike. Gradually the chair was stripped of its function. In my notes, I wrote: “What’s wrong with the chair is that it’s a chair and that it’s in the room.” The process got faster—as things often do—but after the seventh chair, I noticed that even though I was looking, I had forgotten to watch.

It wasn’t until Imrichova sat down that the chair’s use re-emerged, and with it their subjectivity. No longer diffuse but concretely reinstated within a cultural framework that treats identity as a site of value and exchange. I found myself—against my will—thinking of Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2010), where representation is absorbed by the event: no medium, no object, just presence. Claire Bishop critiques this canonical performance as an apt example of how audience participation functions as an aesthetic salve, alleviating the alienation that is understood as a condition of modernity under dominant ideological orders.7 It is likewise an example of what Kornbluh identifies as immediacy: a pervasive contemporary style that fetishises self-identical presence, short-circuiting mediation and—by rendering its formal and institutional conditions invisible—efficiently reproducing the structures it claims to escape.8

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Critique produces nothing but critique, which is sometimes enough, but not for Imrichova. Seated, they shuffled the chair along the floor, a self-conscious adjustment that chafed against the expectation that an audience remain still. Imrichova drew attention to the contemporary conditions of viewing that remain disciplined by the mores of early modernity. In this period, museums and theatres reconfigured spectatorship through directed, frontal attention, training audiences into collective stillness, self-regulation and the suppression of undisciplined forms of public engagement.9 Angela Goh’s Body Loss at Buxton Contemporary in May 2024, drew its force from this ingrained complicity of participation. Her slowed movement around the space and siren call—mouth held open—screamed for audience acquiescence. Although, when Goh slipped out of view as she ascended the stairwell, the audience’s social reflex of polite conversation overrode the aspiration of rapt enthralment, the spell broke and a low chorus of chatter rose on the ground floor.

Something similar happened during Imrichova’s This Is Not A Metaphor, performed at Bus Projects in 2024. At one point, they exited the back room through a narrow door with only some of the audience able to immediately follow. Those waiting began to chit-chat when Imrichova suddenly reappeared in the doorway. The audience froze mid-step and mid-conversation. Imrichova matched our stillness with palpable social discomfort and drew out the moment—it was funny—but more than that: strange, intense, and extraordinary. Our behaviour as an audience was mirrored back to us; the joke was on us, but their overt self-consciousness created a shared sense of strangeness.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Spiritual Alignment functioned less as an outcome for Imrichova than as a door to their ongoing practice. Rather than concluding the residency, their public outcome emerged in a process similar to a propositional study they called “Fast and Nasty,” from their time as an undergraduate of Fine Art (Theatre).10 The strategy—indebted to the methodologies of Anne Bogart—involved groups of performers responding to predetermined constraints of timing and prompts, such as: embodying the spiritual emanation of Britney Spears, singing aloud, or speaking entirely in Russian. These scores demand close attention to time and space, and an interactive negotiation with the constraints of the room and everyday decorum. During the residency, Imrichova registered the room’s intensity by approaching the space as if for the first time again and again. They restricted attention to light, temperature, and the feel of the floor until overwhelm set in. They engaged in intensive exercises of stretching and self-interview, in which Imrichova recorded questions posed to themselves—“What is everyone screaming but no one is saying?” When setting up to record, they remained caught on the adjustment of the chair, unable to move past the desire to get it right.11 The performance began.

Imrichova’s work is recombinatory and does not resolve into the hidden thing it rests upon. They dance around, atop, and beneath ideas of process, mediation, distortion, and representation that is partial or failed. A legacy of Modernism may have shaped our desire to reach for something, but what Imrichova reaches for is never solid, nor does it attempt to draw art and life toward one another or hold them apart. Both are real, both illusory, and they overlap completely. They do not attempt to alleviate alienation but instead see “estrangement as a door.”12 “Of course estrangement is a door,” they said, adding, “I’m aware of what will suffocate me or ruin me,” speaking to how easily one slips into the flow of the world and how constantly it shapes us.13

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Imrichova disappeared backstage and re-emerged pushing a brown velour teacup loveseat on squeaky casters, bulldozing the meticulously placed chairs aside. They centred it in the room, retrieved an Australia Post mailing tube, and repeatedly and aggressively struck the seat cushion and screamed. Their violence toward the chair intensified the accumulated tension; earlier moments of humour offered no relief. Then, the brassy opening of Vidrado em Você—a Brazilian funk track whose title translates to I’m Obsessed with You—filled the room. The house lights snapped to black, replaced by rotating disco lights that scattered moving circles of colour across the walls. The beat dropped and the spectacle doubled, two Temperance Hall staff members stepped forward and filled confetti cannons that shot coloured paper, filling the room.

Imrichova stood on the love seat posing and waving the mailing tube in slow motion, the flashing lights fractured their movement giving an effect of stop animation. I found myself laughing, but not in relief. I was watching now. As Imrichova waved the tube like a flag they slowly wagged their hips in a summit pose—Everest behind them now, peak engagement. Their painstakingly accumulated tension was broken by flashing colour and the dopamine-driven Portuguese rap of DJ Guuga and MC Livinho: 15-second, loopable hooks designed for a clickbait attention economy.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Gabriella Imrichova, Spiritual Alignment, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Video still: James Wright, NON Studios.

Under the rotating lights, they did not dissolve into spectacle so much as oscillate within it. Imrichova’s releases of tension are partial at best—never cathartic, never clean, and always shadowed by the sense that something unresolved has merely shifted position. As we search for meaning, the faster the better; their work makes mediation palpable by refusing a payoff. It’s not a staged relational field that confirms or negates negation, but instead it throws disco lights on the dread that accompanies the infinite and frictionless scroll—where movement is endless, meaning doesn’t arrive and you’re suddenly aware you’ve been looking without watching.

Pode pode pode, sentar
You can, you can, you can sit down

E se tiver muito excitada
And if you’re really horny, you can dance naked

  1. Christian Allaire,“Timothée Chalamet borrowed his Oscars look from the womenswear runways,” Vogue Celebrity Style, 27 March 2022,

    ⬈

  2. Gabriella Imrichova, interviewed by Parker Lev Dupain, Melbourne, 10 December 2025.

  3. A phrase attributed to Pablo Picasso and sometimes Henri Matisse.

  4. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, the style of too late capitalism (Verso Books, 2024), 12.

  5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne's Doubt Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Sense and Non-Sense (1964): 12.

  6. Ibid. 10-11.

  7. Claire Bishop, Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship (Verso Books, 2023), 275.

  8. Kornbluh, Immediacy.

  9. Claire Bishop, Disordered attention: How we look at art and performance today (Verso Books, 2025), 9.

  10. Imrichova, Interview.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

In 2025 and 2026, Performance Review and Temperance Hall are partnering to bring you written responses to Temperance Hall’s 2025 Front Studio Residency. This program offers six choreographic artists two-month studio residencies across the year and includes a stipend, public showing and photographic documentation.

To complement this, Performance Review is publishing a series of written responses on the public outcomes of this program, penned by emerging arts writers and grounded in conversations with these artists. The aim of this collaboration is to mutually develop critical reflection on the practices of local choreographic artists and build performance literacy in arts writing.

These responses have been funded by Temperance Hall through support from Creative Australia and independently commissioned by Performance Review. The writers in this program have been mentored by Anador Walsh, Performance Review’s Director.

The 2025 Temperance Hall Front Studio Residents are Tony Yap, Chung Nguyen, Geoffrey Watson, Deanne Butterworth, Gabriella Imrichova and Fleur Conlon.

This piece by Parker Lev Dupain has been written in response to the public showing of Gabriella Imrichova’s Spiritual Alignment, presented at Temperance Hall on Sunday 2 November 2025.

Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.