Where Lakes Once Had Water is a sensorial video and sound installation built up around the fieldwork of Earth scientists working with Traditional Owners in remote northern Australia. Commissioned by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Sonia is finalising work on a monograph to be published in 2021 by Bundanon Trust. The project tests the hypothesis that the Earth is experienced and understood through different ontologies. These ways of being, seeing, sensing, listening and thinking can align across art, Indigenous thought, science, ancient and modern cultures and the non-human.
Across three large projections, What Listening Knows creatively interrogates different concepts around the act of listening, as if listening were the primary mode of sensing the world. The camerawork is ungrounded, as if imbued with an acoustic consciousness. Acts of recording and listening initiate a camera choreography that twists and tilts across lumpy hillsides, dips into insect worlds and follows dendritic branches of old growth trees. The video is the result of an artist residency at Messums Wiltshire in the UK, where a solo exhibition will be presented in 2021.
Currently in development as a video and sound installation, Unseen Light will be created around an archive of 120 spiritualist séances, intimately recorded in Australia and New Zealand between 1957 and 1972. A single channeler uses her voice as a portal, revealing visitations from deceased relatives, scientists, spirit guides and singing children. Underpinned by research into spiritualism via early domestic recording technologies, the project presents a window into the human desire to connect with worlds and wisdom beyond our own.
Working across video, sound and installation, Sonia has participated in numerous group exhibitions in collaboration with David Chesworth including 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).
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth’s solo exhibitions include ‘What Listening Knows’, Messums Wiltshire, UK (2021); 'Architecture Makes Us: Cinematic Visions of Sonia Leber and David Chesworth', Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2018), UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2019) and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2019); ‘Zaum Tractor’, Gridchinhall, Moscow, Russia (2013); ‘Space-Shifter’, Detached/MONA FOMA, Hobart (2012); and ‘Almost Always Everywhere Apparent’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2007).
Sonia’s research in sound art and auditory culture extends from her early curatorial project ‘Earwitness: Excursions in Sound’ (1994), noted as the first extensive focus on sound art across multiple performance spaces and visual art galleries in Melbourne including Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Sonia is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. She is the recipient of two NAWIC awards for permanent soundscape artworks at Sydney Olympic Park and the Civic in Canberra. Leber and Chesworth were awarded the Substation Contemporary Art Prize (2016), Gold Coast Art Prize (2014) and Screengrab International Media Arts Award (2014).
Public collections include the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Western Australia, RMIT Sonic Arts Collection, University of Wollongong Art Collection, Gold Coast City Gallery, Mildura Arts Centre and Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
