Sasha Grbich

Hospicing WIlliam Light

Sasha Grbich 2023

Video installation


On Sunday October the 6th 1839, Colonel William Light died. He remains the only colonial invader to be buried under the City of Adelaide and rests in a grave where his memorial currently stands on Wauwi/Light Square.

Sasha Grbich’s new solo exhibition, Hospicing Colonel Light, approaches South Australia’s first Surveyor-General as an unquiet ghost whose lingering spirit needs to be released. Grbich uses methods of hospicing to suggest a process of sensitively exorcising colonial ancestors and moving on from the ways of knowing the world that their memorialisation perpetuates.

This exhibition of new work is a video installation incorporating new and archival 16mm film, responses to material from the City of Adelaide and State Library archives, and sound and performance by choir 'Choral Grief'. The key archive for the work is Colonial Light’s Last Journal (1939) in which he recorded the final year of his life. In this remarkable document, Light faithfully recorded the weather alongside descriptions of his deteriorating health. The installation notionally enters the final month of his life, between the date he can no longer write and the date he dies.

Bat Alphabet 40°, Sasha Grbich, 2022, installation with ceramic objects, sound and video including sonic translation developed and recorded by Zoë Barry. Cello performed by Zoë, text created and performed by Goldie Palmer. The video includes the work of deaf interpreter Marijana Turcinov and hearing interpreter Joanna Clough. Dimensions variable.

Making of Bat Alphabet 40° began in the very hot summer at the beginning of 2020 when I noticed that a colony of grey headed flying foxes had moved from NSW to a stand of trees in Botanic Park, Adelaide. Visiting them regularly I observed a difference in intensity of calls during heatwaves and also saw that many had died during the night and fallen to the ground as if still clinging to branches. These flying foxes are now moving around the country due to habitat destruction and have not adapted to Adelaide’s extreme heat, with days above 38/40 degrees dangerous for them. Their move to Adelaide is indicative of the ways environmental systems have shifted during climate changes and since colonial inhabitation - and I approach this art making in the spirit of making sense of the new ecologies that I find myself entangled in.

While observing them that hot summer I began drawing the shapes of the dead bats and then making objects in black clay. Once a number were amassed I invited people with skills in translation to contribute a reading of this found ‘Anthropocene language’. A sonic translation developed and recorded by Zoë Barry, a cello player and composer who treated the ceramic objects like a score and recorded her response. Her daughter Goldie Palmer also gave a reading of the objects and her text and performance can be heard in the mix. Also providing a translation are deaf interpreter Marijana Turcinov and hearing interpreter Joanna Clough who attempt to read the bat alphabet using their knowledge of sign language on the video. These translations form part of the installation, and highlight the importance of diverse knowledges and collectivity in encountering the shapes of future environments.

Cemetery of Pleasures/ Cemitério dos Prazeres (2019) is a single channel work that records the slow life of one of Lisbon’s city cemeteries (named for the red-light district that once thrived around it). While making the work I was thinking about encountering places, and the limits of my voice. As such this work explores description rather than interpretation. Communities of people and animals, work cycles and daily life are carefully followed as I became immersed in slowly passing time.

Wind Work (Windy Point), 2 channel video with sound, 2016. Exhibited at Adelaide Central Gallery in Anything at All, curated by John Neylon.

Wind Work is an ongoing project starting from my desire to have a conversation with the wind.

It is nearly impossible to record the sound of the wind; its vibration on a microphone causes distortion. The digital trace becomes broken sound: a static filled un-graspable voice. My attempts to record the sound of the wind are always pale failures when placed against the lived experience of being in a gale. I am not alone in my failures and desires. Early filmmakers knew the sound of the wind to be enigmatic and invented wind machines to create the effect of encountering it. These ad-hoc constructions (consisting of rolling drums and canvas) were churned to mimic the wind, creating an echo of the unintelligible language of moving air.

 In my studio I have made my own wind machines. My machines are also instruments. I can change their drums and fabrics to make slightly different howls. I have been playing my machines in places where the wind goes in an absurd act of communication with an environmental force. My performances have been recorded in video and sound and become the raw material used in the video installation.

Sasha Grbich with Ashley Kirkness, Manako Nemaia, Myra Faamausili, Samuel Nanai, Sam Verlinder, Liz Filimoemaka, Mana Maihia and Qiane Matata-Sipu. 2 channel video with sound, 6 minutes.

Small Measures was exhibted at HEAT: SOLAR REVOLUTIONS, for Te Uru Contemporary, curated by Janine Randerson 2017. and Track, Adelaide Central Gallery, 2017. With thanks to: SOUL (Save Our Unique Landscape Ihumatao), Forest and Bird, The Oceanian Choir, The Adelaide Central School of Art and the South Australian Government through Arts SA. The first iteration was presented in Vitalstatistix’s Climate Century, 2015.

This video and sound work mixes performers, many from Auckland’s Oceanian Choir, who find and voice a note in response to vulnerable environments. The work brings emphasis to acts of listening and attentiveness in relationships with places. The resultant sound is reminiscent of protest, lullabies and laments, while the camera captures contested spaces under pressure at Auckland’s fringe. Small Measures is an artwork with open points of completion, where new iterations of the work are released as new sung performances are contributed.

READ the catalogue essay for Track

Learning the language of sleep, Installation including: voicing words gleaned from sleep-talk recordings (stereo sound, looped), a heavy object nestled in a wall (metal alloy, 8x6x6cm) and a glass tank with salt water maintained at 37 degrees (73x27x39cm). Also including various hardware and cables, dimensions variable, 2016.  Presented at FELTspace as part of Vote for Me curated by Brigid Noone and Kate Power.

The exhibition opened on the 8th of September 2016, the same day I was admitted to hospital to have a tumor removed. It was a large fibroid attached by a stem to the outside of my uterus. The tumor is was 8cm in diameter, the size of a tidy little sculpture or a fetus at 13 weeks.

The growth was like an involuntary sculpture inside me. I imagined its shape and knew it as an ever-present slight rise on the right side of my abdomen. I have countless MRI images of it, all in hard to decipher greys.  I grew a useless half-live thing and they put me to sleep and cut it out like a bad dream. In Learning the language of sleep I explore the idea of involuntary sculpture through my relationship to this tumor and to its impending removal.

During 2019 Kelly Reynolds and Sasha Grbich travelled in Europe. On the last night in each city we packed our bags and made a sound recording out of the window. These recordings have been pressed to vinyl and will be played back through the VERGEspace window, a different city recording played each week. These city soundscapes will also be walked through Adelaide on quiet evenings, played via cardboard box speakers carried on the backs of the artists; echoing the sounds of distant European cities within our home town.

Last Nights in Cities continues Grbich and Reynolds’s collaborative performative works in urban spaces. We welcome the opportunity to bring our practice home to Adelaide, to working with this city and with its inhabitants.

Sasha Grbich, Composition with Bottles, single channel video with sound, 2’28. Exhibited at Fontanelle Gallery as part of Performative Encounters, 2015.

Overnight, bottles appear on the city streets; half empty, discarded but often carefully placed on the ground, doorsteps or windowsills. This dispersed upright field of things remind us of the movement of people through the city the night before and the movements of plants (in the form of alcohol) in people. The Adelaide City Council designates dry-zones including most of the spaces outside of licensed premises. Alcoholic beverages, rapidly drunk while walking, may be quickly set down where they are finished so as to avoid detection and a fine. Empty bottles in South Australia are worth ten cents, and people collect them for income. The action of carefully setting down a bottle may not be a wilful act of littering but one of anonymous co-operation. Composition with Bottles is an improvised, recorded performance that started from walks around the city. In approaching this work I understand my acts as continuing “unintended performances” that had been instigated by careful, bottle-placing members of the public. The resultant video installation calls for the intimacy of one-person-viewing as it is shown on a TV screen with headphones.

Sasha Grbich (with technologist Heidi Angove), Very Local Radio, a live-streamed unedited public broadcasting channel made on walks through Adelaide and Melbourne presented with PlaceLab and Performing Mobilities, 2015.

READ the Performing Mobilities publication

Very Local Radio is performed in real-time as a mobile event moving through shifting locales. Listening is approached as a mode of activism where radio is used to temporarily amplify the sound of ephemeral social bodies. The work activates collective listening as a way of navigating city spaces. Very Local Radio, is open to direct and risky encounters. The broadcast mechanism is a shopping cart full of technology, loaded with flickering lights and with a huge boom microphone at the helm. In performing the work I discovered the shopping trolley apparatus to be effective in breaking down social barriers and starting conversations with people. I conclude that the object must be both familiar and unexpected enough to provoke curiosity while not appearing dangerous. It is slight playful re-appropriation of an object of the urban environment. It removes the uncomfortable possibility of surveillance – the shopping trolley is too big and loud to go unnoticed.

Sasha Grbich, 2020

Bubblegum forms, made by mouth and full of breath are stuck on the end of sticks found when walking around the area. These eyeball-like mouthy things are installed close the the footpath window as though seeking connection (or contamination) with passersby. Everyday they deflate their single breath through their thin gum membrane. New breaths are added throughout the exhibition.

Sasha Grbich and Kelly Reynolds, commissioned for ACE Open as part of ‘Plenty’, curated by Toby Chapman, 2018.

View the Urban Sun Project book - Purchase enquiries can be made through the contact form on this website.

Sasha Grbich and Kelly Reynolds take as their starting point Sundrop Farms, located approximately 300km north of Adelaide on the Spencer Gulf. Sundrop Farms is a commercial greenhouse facility that uses an immense solar tower to produce energy to power the plant growing systems, as well to operate a cutting-edge thermal desalination plant, which provides water to crops. Sundrop Farms produces around 15,000, or 10%, of Australia’s tomato production, with all crops being supplied directly to Coles supermarket chain.  

With Urban Sun Project, Grbich and Reynolds intervene in the chain of mass-produced vegetables by propagating their own tomato plants from the seeds of a store-bought Coles varietal tomato. Outside of the highly-regulated and controlled context of the greenhouse, Grbich and Reynolds have invited participants to grow these seedlings in their own homes, or backyards, to explore what kinds of care are required to grow such a plant.

Here in the gallery, Grbich and Reynolds reference another site that was formative in the development of this project; their studio. You are welcome to take a tray of tomato seedlings, and try your hand at growing Coles tomatoes in your home, backyard, or a sunfilled corner of the city.

Text: Toby Chapman, images Sam Roberts

A Series of Uncomfortable Silences, 5 x 10minute sound works on vinyl records, cardboard covers with photographic prints, installation elements. Commissioned for Adelaide Contemporary 2015.

View the cataloge here

Adelaide is a quiet city. I have heard this assertion many times in the years I have lived here, and notice that it is both celebrated and hated for its quietness. It is perhaps the association of loudness with the impolite, the brash and the disruptive that are at play here: qualities all at odds with the tucked in propriety of this place. As I move around this city I notice unwritten rules of volume revealed as dogs bark, children cry and when I speak too loudly.

This work forms a part of an exploration that is led by sound and traverses uncomfortably quiet moments, places and histories. I am concerned with working locally and I undertake acts that contribute to the situations I observe. I have used audio recordings from places with uncomfortable histories or public spaces socially uncomfortable and physically threatening. 10 minute recordings from these places have been pressed to vinyl. Installed with a record player and headphones for one person listenership, the work traces relations between participating viewers, myself and the city.

Three sound works commissioned for the opening of the Museum of Discovery MOD. at the University of South Australia.

Every location has a unique soundtrack, and Sit Down With… invites you to explore three specific sites without sight.

Each soundscape is made up of hidden, secret and unknown sounds collected from the three locations, all with significance to MOD.  Created by South Australian artist Sasha Gribch, the soundscapes invite you to explore places and the environment through the sound rather than vision, and sit down with:

The River Torrens: flowing through the city and meandering beside MOD. the river is central to Adelaide’s past, present, and future. Found sounds include marine life, bubbles, and the movement of water.

A skate park: MOD. is located on what was once a skate park, and the sounds collected from another Adelaide skate park are a nod to what came before, as well as the continuing significance to the location as a place for young people.

A tree: What does a tree sound like? Sasha recorded the hidden noises a tree makes, visiting one of South Australia’s oldest trees located in Brownhill Creek to record its sounds. The tree is significant to our place in Adelaide and on Kaurna Land.

Sasha Grbich & Kelly Reynolds

Exhibited at praxis ARTSPACE, in On Being an Artist: 11 Actions [curated by eDuard Helmbold + Gabi Lane] July – 21st August 2020

For this work we have created and entered an ecology with stinging nettles. We used our bodies as barometers, we stung ourselves, monitored the nitrogen in our piss and watered them with it. We performed the plants in us.

Light Work 2, digital color prints, 110 x 80cm, 2015

Light Work 2 (2015) is a physical exploration of the edge of houses where light spills out into public spaces. Initially I made a series of digital images developed during visits to friends’ houses. During the visits I would work with whatever materials they could find and spare, to create a skin built out from the edges of a window that was photographed as the daylight faded. The method of working with found and readily available materials was instigated to remove control or prediction as to the look of the form, and to prompt improvisation in making an object that performed with house and light.

Light Work 1, installation including three single channel videos and 11 wall texts, 2015.

Light Work 1 (2015) developed through finding, recording and writing narratives for “found performances”. These unintended performances involve the turning on and off of lights in suburban houses at sunrise and sunset. I walked around suburban neighbourhoods with my camera at these times and over a period of months, capturing sequences where lights flickered or held still, forming (perhaps) unintended rhythms not unlike morse-code-like patterns albeit with light.  In the event that I captured an interesting sequence of light change in a house, I would later write a short “performance score”, in which I imagined the actions of an anonymous person undertaking the light performance.

Conversation Work is a single channel video made with Carol Grbich and exhibited at Fontanelle Gallery in 2013 as part of exhibition  Beyonce is a Feminist, curated by Brigid Noone.

The work was developed from a conversation between my mother and I. It is a video of us listening to each other talk.

I think of this work in terms of collecting and measuring the distance between me and my mother. (between mothers and daughters, between generations of women, between waves of feminism). The video pays attention to paying attention: privileging the action of listening and the attempt to understand. There is no sound in the work, I took it out in the hope of making more space for the conversation you might have with your own elders.

Sleep Work, 2 channel video with sound, 3hours, 2015

Sleep Work was filmed as the light changed from bright mid afternoon to night during the summer, in Victoria Square, Adelaide. Undertaken a number of times, performances were filmed either with a single camera facing towards the centre of Victoria Square or two cameras, one placed on either side of me. Cameras were positioned so as to capture movements and activity that occurred around my sleeping body. The cameras used were chosen for their ability to take three continuous hours of footage. I slept throughout the shoots. The resulting footage was projected on opposing gallery walls. No cuts were made to the footage, however one channel was temporally shifted, starting 1.5 hours into the shoot.

I investigated sleeping as I feel that it holds a disruptive (and productive) position as a “non-relational act” amongst the action orientated approaches explored in this research. I posit that sleeping causes muting or decentering of human subjectivity that may lead to a (risky) heightening of other agencies. I also explore the social and political disruptions and resonances caused by sleeping in public. 

Broadcasts from Empty Rooms, Sasha Grbich with Heidi Angove, 4 x overnight live internet radio broadcasts, website, 2014. Presented as part of FELTmaps.

Broadcasts from Empty Rooms involved overnight live internet broadcast that took a different empty space for each broadcast night. Located in Port Adelaide, the project moved between empty buildings, broadcasting form sun down to sun up each Saturday for a month; activating empty spaces by listening to them. The buildings chosen as broadcast locations were ones with uncertain futures.  

In its first iteration, Dirt Works, soil sourced from sites of development and demolition in Adelaide City, wooden boxes, Perspex, grow lights, water, video and sound elements, installation dimensions variable. 2014/15.

The soil in Adelaide is hard to access. As with many large cities, Adelaide is an environmental system where concrete, bitumen and tan bark are the dominant ground coverings and exposed earth is rare. Noticing this, I focused on the status of soil, and I began to search for and document empty blocks of land and places where concrete had been pulled up, or earth turned over. These are often sites of development and demolition and are carefully cordoned off behind cyclone fences and barricades. My interest with this particular soil and with seemingly empty or vacant land may be located in the ways these places were sites where human initiated narratives of development and growth had paused, and other nonhuman forces at work could be observed.

The second iteration of the work was undertaken as part of the The Sauerbier House Transformation Project: A Year of Research Curated by Lisa Harms and in conversation with Poet /Activist/ Cultural Artist and Mentor Ngankiburka-Mekauwe (Senior Woman of the Water) Georgina Williams. She supported me to identify, gather and tend soil from land under threat of urban encroachment. The work was exhibited at Sauerbier House during 2016.

Handmade Disaster (deluge ) was created for conversations in ellipsis, a multi–site “material conversation” curated by Lisa Harms dealing allegorically with notions of territory and possession, loss and desire… shown as part of SALA (South Australian Living Artist Festival), 2012.

The work involved collecting sounds of the rain and playing them back in a gallery space through small speakers that were held in glasses and other vessels. The sounds were recorded over the period of one winter and the exhibition took place in the following dry season. Each speaker played a different recording of the rain, each held a small sound but when taken together they sounded like a deluge. The soundscape was constantly changing as the 32 channels looped at their own rate, evoking the feeling of being in an ongoing swelling and abating storm.

‘I grew up in Victoria and South Australia where rain is welcomed if sometimes begrudgingly. In these thirsty places the plants unfurl and the roof of my house becomes a blanket with me snug beneath it.

Last year I undertook a residency in Cairns during the wet season and those heavy deluges, screaming down at me from hot, grey skies brought a whole new cast to my experiences. I have memories of rain so hard and dense that even under shelter you feel pinned to the spot from the violence of it. I remember: a creaking weatherboard house that felt like a reckless boat, the delight of warm rain, the terror of cyclone, the feeling of giving in to uncontrollable weather (and the relief that brings).

I have used our soft, infrequent southern rain to make a deluge. I have collected for myself “a disaster”. This is a love letter to the Cairns wet season. A making and unmaking of my experience of a cyclone; a way of remembering the wettest state while standing in the driest.’ - Sasha Grbich

Sasha Grbich and Kelly Reynolds, Sauerbier House 27 June - August 1 2020

We had initially proposed to explore architectural ruin and planned to challenge the Sauerbier House building by welcoming the power of the river and the creatures that inhabit its adjacent eco-systems. As our residency began, COVID-19 emerged and spread globally. We found ourselves starting a residency amidst lockdown. The emphasis in our work shifted dramatically as we responded to limited access to materials and our newly restricted mobility. We sourced objects from in and around our homes, performed on our rooftop and shared experiences through online social media platforms.

We used our residency to draw on any knowledge or method we could find to make sense of our COVID-19 experiences. We really wanted to leave the house. Developing alternative ways of travel, we investigated astral travel, psychic connection and time travel. Our title, Time Traveller for Hole, is a reference to the search for a wormhole that would take us out of this time and our homes.

Undertaking a residency during COVID-19 was an opportunity for us to think about alternative ways of making. We found ourselves working quickly, fluidly and often improvising. We worked more personally; our domestic spaces and personal objects have come into this work as never before. We have created objects for hope and change by turning the focus to our private worlds, where we looked for threads of connection as a way forward. The opportunity to continue our residency at this time re-enforced the importance of art in a crisis; the importance of contributing to culture in a time of upheaval.

While the theme of architectural ruin was somewhat left behind, the impermanence of structures is still an important aspect of the work. Crickets and nettles are welcomed to make home in the gallery space. The works acknowledge and responds to the colonial history of the building by seeking to destabilise its permanence. You might think of the body of work as a spell for change and a way of processing the changes the COVID-19 virus has catalysed.

Conservatory is a 31 channel sound installation with wall drawing (2011) by Sasha Grbich and Lisa Harms in association with the Tanks Art Centre and Cairns and Region Multicultural Association (CARMA).

Read the catalogue essay by Sera Waters

The work  responded to the architecture and history of the Tanks Art Centre: originally a storehouse for oil during the Second World War. Starting from a conversation about border protection and expanding to encompass broad experiences of making home, conservatory offered a poetic reflection on belonging. The artists, in residence for a month – with the assistance and support of CARMA – recorded conversations about what it means to make and defend a sense of “home”; during open recording sessions and on visits with immigrants, traditional owners, established farming families and travellers.

31 channels of sound (31 stories) were recorded and played back via the 31 poles in the space. A wall drawing unfolded the australian coastline into a flat horizon that circled the full 100 meters of the space’s circumference.

Versions of She took a deep breath were exhibited at Downtown Artspace (Adelaide), Adelaide Central Gallery, and as part of the national graduate exhibition Hatched at PICA (Perth). Images shown are from the installation at Downtown Artspace.

In making the work I collected dandelion heads or ‘wishes’ over a winter season. Encased in perspex boxes they become like held or failed wishes; holding both the desire for release and the danger of weed dissemination. Set upon fragile stands the work became a fragile field that swayed in response to movements of air and people.

Reading aloud to you single channel video with sound was shown as part of the Arthouse project (curated by Brigid Noone) Adelaide, May 2014.

Reading aloud to you is a ongoing collection of found moments. I set out with my camera to look for people reading quietly in public. I wait on trains, in libraries, parks and bus stops in the hope that people will allow me to record them reading aloud a short passage from whatever text (book, newspaper, mobile device) they are engrossed in. These are not rehearsed performances. There are moments of hesitancy and generosity in the footage that reflect both the reader’s and my connections and discomforts. This collection started in May 2012.