Menopause Gym
'for Rebecca'
Mad House Helsinki, 2024
Menopause Gym is a performance, sculpture installation of iterations that very depending on context and duration. Consistent factors are a cube frame(s), resistance bands and gym balls, executing a series of movements and exercise that invite periods of energy and fatigue.
It was first presented at Mad House Helsinki in autumn 2024 as a 6 hour performance art work presented over two days, 3 hours each day.
Viewers were invited to come and go, remaining for as long or as short a time as they wished.
The dedication is to Rebecca Horn, whose work has been of such enormous influence on mine. Wearing a pointed hat during one section of the work was a small gesture towards her Unicorn (Einhorn), 1970.
Performing on the edge of can and can't.
Part sculpture, installation, performance art; executing strange exercise circuits, bad balancing and ungainly suspensions. Actions, objects, sweaty copper and salt.. An accumulation of Detritus forming as the menopausal gym is activated.
The work was supported by Mad House Helsinki and Taike, the Finnish Arts Promotion Centre.
Mad House Helsinki also conducted an interview at the time, which you can read here.
There was an official photographer, Helmi Padatsu who captured moments from the first hour of the first day. Other documentation was initiated throughout by viewers who took photos with their phones.
I’ve often eschewed audience photography, it can be such a barrier to the lived and raw encounter however I’m very glad that I trusted the audience and their discretion, without them there would be little documentation whatsoever of the shifting, changing images that evolved and unfolded during the Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Thank you to each and every one of them. Their variety offers audience views and conveys something of the dynamism of this version of the Menopause Gym.
Scroll to the bottom of the post to read a short response by Helsinski based artist Essi Kausalainen
Kira O’Reilly’s Menopause Gym is a sculptural work in making. It is an evolving situation, an unexpected play of endurance, strength and elegance that toys with the audience’s expectations and gaze. With an outstanding articulation, O’Reilly performs the body as a relation shaping, and being shaped by, its environment. The transitional process of the body in menopause, unfolds as a field of vibrating possibilities. Heartbreaking, hilarious, intelligent and challenging, the performance cuts from one situation to another like a knife. In its sphere, O’Reilly sweats and breathes against the resistance of the objects, the situation, of gravity and time. She transitions into a goddess, moving the gym balls like planets into cosmic constellations. In a blink of an eye, she lands into a Buster Keatonesque slapstick mode with the resistance bands. The decades of rigorous artistic practice, of life, are graciously present as O’Reilly throws herself into this impossible workout.
Essi Kausalainen, 2024