^{Cover Image: Sarah Rodigari, On Time, On Labour: Four Live Works, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2026. Photo: Fionn Mulholland}

Traversing multiple rooms in PICA’s galleries, patrons of On Labour: Four Live Works were greeted on Friday by producer Rose Kingdom-Barron, who softly hosted us through a bold, profound journey of personal testaments to the perils of finding safety or sustaining artistic independence in our current industry structure. 

From disparate performance backgrounds including nightlife, performance art, playwriting and poetry, each artist’s respected practices of institutional critique and cultural leadership were welcomed as individual responses to our times. 

Opening with Sarah Rodigari’s On Time, we entered a fluoro-lit West End Gallery and surrounded twelve ornate but non-descript steel stands. Rodigari addressed us plainly but captivatingly in a winding spoken journey through parameters of worth, and the push and pull of maintaining facades of “casual”. Drawing honest attention to how “casual” impacts  social performance, fashion, sexuality and employment, Rodigari’s lived experience seemed futile against larger rules to present false narratives of security in an ever-crumbling academic landscape — a journey known well amidst a palpably empathetic, largely arts-based audience. 

Entering with an outlandish caricature of a dangerous finance bro, Grace Connors strung stories through satirical gesture and exaggerated verbal choreography in Bluebird23 – responsive with the audience’s waves of laughter throughout. 

Themes of power-driven isolation and imbalanced ideals of success take shape, before grounding us – out of drag – in the shadowy truth of complicity marking all administrators of colonial systems, contextualising her disquieting performance as a reflection on former JobSeeker-required employment in a ruthless debt collection agency. 

Earlier on, I wondered whether the program – echoing the understated delivery of performance art – would be conceptually inaccessible for some. But quickly, each performer established a shared ritual of acknowledging, owning, purging and critiquing the unjust realities we breathe every day in the unspoken social and material instability of arts careers. Embodied deeply through performers’ own styles, responses rippling visibly through the open plan audience layout, the experience was truly collective – largely reading from beautifully crafted scripts, performers spoke to us, with us. 

To the rousing backdrop of Ravel’s Boléro, Barbara Hostalek’s …Of Heart ushered in a softer world, speaking to oft-hidden struggles of creation. Ballet dancers Sandy Delasalle Scannella and Aurélien Scannella’s ever-controlled movements struck the space in silent conversation, juxtaposing Hostalek’s grounded speech to us. 

Bearing witness to the expectation to hide all the work, Hostalek then shared a glorious story of natural life within bilya (river), accompanied by Sandy’s classical-derived physical storytelling. From a ballet lens, I couldn’t help noticing the freedom expressed in Hostalek’s buoyant tale of Noongar Boodjar contrasted with the rigid specificity of choreographed movements. 

The evening closed with the cathartic Bringing Home the Besan by Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa. Accompanied by soothing, soaring strings from Pavan Kumar Hari on dilruba, a classical Sikh instrument, Khalsa drew connections across migration to xenophobia to model minority pressures, underpinned by a relentless continuation of existence as a brown woman in the arts. Sensitively uplifted by cathartic music, she unravelled the endless nature of advocacy work, waking up every day in a position of power to ask, yet again, “How much truth can this space hold today?” 

Clever and unsparing, On Labour finished feeling like a warm hug – I was seen by everything I heard, and easily spurred to discuss it with anyone who held it with me.  

On Labour was stripped back, drawing more attention to the audience through house lights, in-the-round seating, and breaking the fourth wall. Amidst recurring accounts of generosity being exploited and well-intentioned assimilation, this subtle centring of the audience formed an undeniable message – we are the work. 

Audible bubbles of agreement, relatability and support rounded the performances in exchange with their saying what needs to be said and faced when our lives are ruled by institutions – a truth made taboo only by the very themes of covering up colonialism and labour that each artist broke open with the simplicity of their voices and our listening. 

On Labour was a tactical, truthful, energising exposure of multiple layers repressing working artists today. 

As Rodigari affirmed, “Precariousness kills solidarity,” and Khalsa reminded, “Safe stories do not save us” — On Labour is remarkably the most current and necessary local contemporary performance I’ve seen in this heightened era of censoring solidarity and highly exploited but underfunded art-making. 

On Labour: Four Live Works ran from 2^nd – 4^th July at PICA.