Sonia Leber has been appointed as Senior Industry Fellow in the School of Art.

Sonia Leber is known for her distinctive installation artworks, using video, sound, architecture, and public participation. Her practice draws on cinematic methods (sonic and visual) to build up highly detailed and conceptual videoworks that emerge from social, architectural and technological settings, often through research-based residencies in places undergoing social change. These works emerge from the real, but exist significantly in the realm of the imaginary.

In collaboration with David Chesworth, exhibitions include 56th Biennale of Venice (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); The Last Reader, annex M, Megaron, Athens (2018); The State We Are In, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland (2018); And Tomorrow And, Index, Stockholm (2018); The Score, Ian Potter Museum of Art (2017); Call of the Avant-Garde, Heide (2017); Borders, Barriers,Walls, MUMA, Melbourne (2016); Melbourne Now, NGV (2013–14) and Stealing the Senses, Govett-Brewster Gallery, NZ (2011).

Their recent survey exhibition Architecture Makes Us, curated by Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne (2018) toured to UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2019) and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2019). Further solo exhibitions include Zaum Tractor, Gridchinhall, Moscow (2013); Space-Shifter, Detached/MONA FOMA, Hobart (2012); and Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2007).

Leber and Chesworth were awarded the Substation Contemporary Art Prize (2016); Gold Coast Art Prize (2014); and Screengrab International Media Arts Award (2014). Sonia is the recipient of two public art awards from the National Association of Women in Construction for permanent soundscape artworks at Sydney Olympic Stadium and Canberra’s Civic (2000 and 2002).

Sonia brings to RMIT’s School of Art her highly developed international expertise in creative film-making, photography, soundscape design, spatial exhibition design and landmark public art. She will be an advocate for thinking through sound, passionate about the ways that sound art can be developed both as a practice and within interdisciplinary contexts.

A full project history can be found at leberandchesworth.com.

Sonia is currently an Associate Researcher with ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH). Together with David Chesworth she is completing a significant two-channel video artwork Where Lakes Once Had Water, exploring the labour of Earth scientists and Traditional Owners in remote northern Australia. A project monograph with essays by Sophie Knezic, Fiona Gruber and Tim Flannery will be published by Bundanon Trust.

Sonia is also working with David on What Listening Knows, an immersive audio and 4K video installation to be premiered in 2020–21 in a solo exhibition at Messums Wiltshire, UK. What Listening Knows creatively interrogates different concepts around the act of listening, particularly the concept of ‘the microphone’s gaze’, which shifts the idea of the ocular gaze, or camera gaze, into an acoustic dimension.

Sonia Leber RMIT staff profile
Sonia Leber & David Chesworth