Sat 20.6.2026 // 19.30
Photo: Crystal Wall & Asher Ó Gormáin
Sat 20.6.2026 // 19.30
Work-in-progress showing/studio visit
Bräuhausgasse 40, 1050 Wien // pay as you wish/can // drinks & food
Artistic direction, performance: Crystal Wall & Asher Ó Gormáin
Dramaturgical support: Imani Rameses
Outside Eye: Veza Fernández
Conversational partner: Cathy Walsh
Supported by APL Angewandte Performance Laboratory.
Concealment of ripped and buried words lingers in the air. Ripples of tenacious, spirited tendencies are growing as fingertips rub, eyes blink, the veil of the caol áit* thins. There leaks inspiration of a mythical creature an puca*, a trickster quietly luring unsuspecting bithiúnach*.
What Was Mouthed… is a decolonial sound-movement performance and soft protest. Wall and Ó Gormáin embrace the mouth as an archive of indigenous Gaeilge* and site of living slang; the body as a transmitter of socio-political pulse; the mask as a technology of identity, self-definition, and deconstruction.
Ó Gormáin and Wall intertwine diasporic and affinitive connections to Ireland. Dealing with the complex plurality of self, of being at once the colonised and the coloniser they engage in acts of rewriting and rerooting.
Although the work is grounded in Ireland’s experience of cultural suppression, the work seeks to relate to broader histories of empire and erasure, asking: How do cultures and bodies reclaim that which has been taken? What new forms of aliveness become possible when we do?
Grá mór – big love
* caol áit – thin place
* an puca – celtic folklore creature
* bithiúnach – bad guy
* Gaeilge – Irish
Asher Ó Gormáin (IE/UK/AT) is an Irish artist working across choreographic and visual art practices as a performance maker, dramaturge and lecturer. Her work engages closely with objects and materials, drawing out their performative agency to reveal the tactile, sensuous and existential dimensions of the “ordinary”, challenging anthropocentric perspectives. She holds a BA (Hons) degree in choreography from the Dartington College of Arts (2005), a diploma in dance from SEAD – Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (2008) and an MA degree with honours in visual art (TransArts) from the Vienna University of Applied Art (2021). She has taught at the Angewandte Performance Lab (APL) in Vienna on a regular basis since 2021. In 2020, she established HOOD for Artist Parents. Her most recent work, “mind numbing filthy finger potholes: a glossary of the paradox of boredom”, premiered at brut Wien. www.asherogorman.com
Crystal Wall (AT) is based in Vienna and touches on the space between performance and singing, poetry and ritual, folk culture and queerness. Crystal relates (alpine) folk customs to queerness and infuses them with a pleasurable process of transformation until new performative rituals emerge. Their sonorous explorations cultivate an emphasis on wicked pitches and multi-modulated voices, and soft frilled screams. Through embodied polyphony and collective storytellings her/their work unravels aqueous poetic soundings and luring chants.