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'The Gift'. 14th to 16th March 2012. Commissioned FADO Performance Art Centre, Toronto (http://www.performanceart.ca/). This work was developed by Hassall over a period of three days. On the evening of the first and second days, the gallery was open for two hours (6-8pm) during which the public was invited to view the work in progress (with Hassall also talking about his research on the second day); on the third and final day the gallery was open from 7pm with Hassall’s culminating performance commencing at 8pm.(http://www.performanceart.ca/index.php?m=program&id=224).

Hassall developed his work in response to anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s assertion in his work 'The Gift' that gifts are never free, and to the question that drove Mauss’s research: “What power resides in the object given, that causes its recipient to pay it back?”. Hassall structured his own research by means of three, echoing questions: “Is art torn between the commodity and the gift, the supermarket and the church? Should art be freely given or paid for? How does art create and enhance social relations?". He then devised a series of participatory processes and actions by means of which to address these. Hassall invited people to come to the gallery to give him a gift/object and, in return, to receive a gift in the form of an action/performative response designed to achieve an exchange through the rendering of a service. These exchanges would be followed by a series of ‘exploratory actions, placements and performances’ with the gifts/objects themselves undergoing modification by Hassall as a means of articulating his responses to and readings of them. Hassall conceived of his ‘actions, placements and performances’ as an artist’s methodology for understanding human beings’ use of ‘the gift’ concluding, through the process of his performed research, that inanimate objects “are not numb and unresponsive; they are stimuli, they are archives – animistic catalysts for experiments in reverie, imagination and memory.”

At the Toronto Free Gallery, 50 people attended the preparatory exchange/performance; 30 people attended the talk and 80 the main performance.