Still Lives

Still Lives: Melbourne
Presented at National Gallery of Victoria for Rising Festival 2022

Five Australian Rules players transformed into living sculptures, in which a spectacular mark by footy legend and proud Noongar man Andrew Krakouer was recreated as a suspended tableau. As spectators gathered in the National Gallery of Victoria for the Rising Festival 2022, the powerful influence of football in the cultural life of Melbourne became an object of interrogation.

Still Lives: Glasgow
Presented by Take Me Somewhere, Oct 2025

For Glasgow, Still Lives enters the charged world of professional wrestling, a scene with deep local roots and fiercely loyal fans. The artists will lean into the city’s appetite for drama and physical theatre, exploring energy and inertia, movement and pause, kayfabe and the suspension (quite literally) of disbelief. Collaborating with local wrestlers, they will re-stage the high drama and choreography of the ring, tying up their bodies mid-tackle and suspending them above the mat. The performance will be soundtracked live by Huntress: expect goth-metal textures, pulsing techno and strange, beautiful noise.

Still Lives: Brisbane
Presented by Brisbane Powerhouse, Oct 2025

A month long sisual and sonic installation which concluded in 2 performances, Still Lives: Brisbane revisits the city’s legacy of punk and counterculture, specifically referencing The Saints and their renowned single (I’m) Stranded. Instruments are bound and suspended in intricate webs of rope high in the Turbine Platform of Brisbane Powerhouse. Still Lives: Brisbane is a sonic, sculptural invocation of punk’s defiance, a tribute to the band that pioneered the modern music scene in Brisbane, and a meditation on how history lingers in the air.

Still Lives: Ghent
Presented by VIERNULVIER, May 2025

In Ghent’s unique Minard theatre that has classical theatre seating on one side, and is a contemporary "black box" on the other, two of Belgium’s greatest cycling legends become living art. For this Ghent edition of Still Lives, the artists turn to Flemish cycling — where racing is myth, and riders are heroes. Johan Museeuw and Nico Mattan and their bicycles are bound, lifted, and held in motion: suspended mid-sprint, a living tableau of speed, strength, vulnerability, and history. Accompanied by the live sound of Belgian accordionist, composer, and experimentalist Suzan Peeters.

Still Lives: Auckland
Presented by the F.O.L.A. - [AKL], 2024

In Town Hall of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, eight female rugby players were bound together to re-create one half of an interlocking scrum. Urgent issues, such as sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia within sporting culture are also revealed through the knotty negotiation between bodies.

Still Lives: Fremantle
Presented by the Fremantle Biennale 2023 SIGNALS

Looking to maritime past and histories of imprisonment of a key naval port in Australia, whilst out at sea, sailing towards Walyalup / Fremantle from the direction of Wadjemup / Rottnest Island, a bugle player was suspended between the masts of a 130 year old pearl lugger. As the ship entered the Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour at sunset, the bugler performed The Last Post, an international anthem for remembering and rest.

Still Lives: Venice
Presented by La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Danza, 2019

For the 2019 Venice Biennale, a gondola and gondolier were tied together using 1km of locally made jute rope. With its relationship to water and boats, rope is an ever-present material in Venice. Before it became a central venue for the Biennale, the Arsenale also housed the making of rope for its naval fleet. This durational performance-installation took place in a public square on Via Garibaldi, in front of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Monument.