On Labour: Four Live Works
2–4 July 2026
7pm, 100 minutes (15-minute interval)
On Labour: Four Live Works is a program of live performance informed by the practices and lived experiences of four artists– Sarah Rodigari, Grace Connors, Barbara Hostalek and Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa—each working at the intersection of performance and the written word.
Together, the artists’ practices variously trace the entanglements of labour and identity. Through performance—encompassing movement, poetry, pathos and humour—they raise questions including whose labour counts, under what conditions, and what constitutes ‘work’?
Unfolding one after another, in different spaces throughout PICA, the performances collectively consider how art might reconfigure our relationships to time, labour and one another. They ask how, in moments of exhaustion and uncertainty, performance can offer not only critique, but solidarity and hope.
Sarah Rodigari: On Time
Created and performed: Sarah Rodigari
Location: West End Gallery
On Time is a poetic monologue that reflects on the word ‘casual’ and its relationship to labour, intimacy and performance. Developed in response to the global pandemic, when the precarity of casual and contract workers became impossible to ignore, the work draws from 12 interviews with casual back- and front-of-house staff at Carriageworks, Sydney (Gadigal Country). First presented as part of The National in 2021, On Time weaves these voices into a collective address, giving form to the rhythms, tensions and quiet solidarities of casualisation.
Please see Addendum: Marking Time (2026) prepared by Sarah Rodgari at the end of this program.
Artist biography
Sarah Rodigari is an artist whose practice addresses the social and political potential of art. Sarah’s work is site-responsive, employing durational live action, improvisation and dialogical methodologies to produce text-based performance and installations. Rodigari has worked with and within various contexts and institutions. These include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The Poetry Project (NYC) and SOMA (Mexico City). Rodigari teaches Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.
Grace Connors: Bluebird23
Created and performed: Grace Connors
Audio Visual: Jack Caddy
Location: Central Gallery
Bluebird23 combines clowning, stagecraft and performance lecture to examine debt, humiliation and the personal and structural forces that shape economic survival. The work blows the whistle on predatory welfare systems, shreds apart misconceptions of debt and rewrites the narrative on financial literacy.
Content warnings: Course language and financial trauma
Bluebird23 has been supported through the newly formed Experimental Commissioning Consortium, and is currently undergoing creative development with APHIDS (VIC) as part of their Supermassive program.
Artist biography
Grace Connors is an artist and curator working within the visual and performing arts sector. She has exhibited across Australia since 2016, with her practice predominantly performance–based and oriented towards storytelling, kinship and collaboration. She performed at Hobiennale in 2017 with the performance featured in Frieze Magazine. She has presented performance lectures at UWA Gender Diversity in Music and Art Conference 2019 and Revelation Film Festival Academic Conference in 2018. Connors has undertaken studio residencies at Midland Junction Arts Centre in 2020, and has been artist in residence at PICA in 2019, 2025 and 2026.
Barbara Hostalek: …Of Heart
Writer: Barbara Hostalek
Performers: Barbara Hostalek, Sandy Delasalle Scannella and Aurelien Scannella
Location: Gallery 1
…Of Heart centres on the intensity of labour within the artistic process itself. The creative process takes time, discipline and collaboration. Hostalek’s words are presented alongside a physical performance by Ballet4Wellbeing founders, Sandrine Delasalle and Aurelien Scannella. The trio approach the piece like a team sport—where words and movement collide and swell, prompting us to reflect on our own labours of love.
Artist biographies
Barbara Hostalek is a poet and playwright of Yawuru and Gija Aboriginal heritage, born and raised up on Larrakia Country (Darwin) and now based in Boorloo (Perth). Following studies in veterinary science, Hostalek began to write short plays whilst participating in Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company’s Writer’s Group in 2015. Since then, she has expanded her playwrighting craft to include poetry, reviews and spoken word performance. Hostalek’s recent short plays include Perpetuity (2020); Prickly (2021) and ASK (2024). In 2020, Black Swan State Theatre Company produced a series of her monologues Unsung Heroes: Own Way (2020) and her work Banned was adapted for radio by ABC RN Fictions. Independent collaborative productions include: ASK (2025, The Blue Room Theatre) and Standing Tall Yorga (2025). THIRST, written by Hostalek for Yirra Yaakin went on tour to outer and regional WA in 2025.
Sandrine Delasalle and Aurélien Scannella are leading Ballet dancers with Aurelien as the former Artistic Director of Western Australian Ballet for 11 years and Sandrine as his Associate. Together they are the founders of Ballet4Wellbeing. After many years working within the professional ballet world, they recognised that the core principles of ballet posture, musicality, coordination, artistry and expression have powerful wellbeing benefits that extend far beyond professional training. Drawing on their extensive professional experience and interdisciplinary knowledge of anatomy, music, art history and movement science, Sandrine and Aurélien developed an approach that adapts classical ballet principles into safe, inclusive and accessible formats. Their work combines Vaganova, French and American ballet traditions with evidence-informed approaches to ageing, mobility and wellbeing. The focus is on bringing the benefits of ballet to people of all ages and abilities.
Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa: Bringing Home the Besan
Created and performed: Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa
Composer/Music: Pavan Kumar Hari
Location: Gallery 2
Bringing Home the Besan came from the grind Sukhjit couldn’t ignore—creative survival, migration and the cost of ‘making it work’. The labour we inherit, the labour we hide and what it takes to keep going—is all made visible in this poetic musical collaboration where Khalsa’s spoken word combines with live music performed by Pavan Kumar Hari on the dilruba, a 300-year-old Sikh string instrument.
Artist biographies
Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa OAM is a Boorloo-based writer, performer, producer and cultural leader whose work has redefined contemporary Australian storytelling, earning her the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2025. Across the past decade, she has earned recognition from the Performing Arts WA Awards (2020), Mona Brand Writing Awards (2022), WA Multicultural Awards (2022) and the Australian Sikh Awards (2023). Her stage and screen journey began as a finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam (2014), semi-finalist on Australia’s Got Talent (2016) and winner of The Moth GrandSLAM (2019). She premiered her sell-out show Fully Sikh (Barking Gecko Theatre Company and Black Swan Theatre Company, 2019), was a storytelling trainer at the Centre for Stories (2018–23), released her debut hip-hop single Collectables (2023) and her debut novel Fully Sikh: hot chips and turmeric stains (Upswell Publishing, 2025). Sukhjit is an alumna of Ron Howard’s talent lab, Impact Australia (2020), Theatre Producers of Colour Broadway program (2023) and the Creative Australia Leadership program (2024–2025) and is currently the CEO of The Blue Room Theatre.
Pavan Kumar Hari is a dynamic multidisciplinary artist whose work spans composition, performance, dance, acting and directing. Recognised for his vibrant and emotive musical language, he creates dramatic and expressive work for theatre, film, dance, and the concert hall. Beginning his training at age three at Saraswati Mahavidhyalaya (SMV), Kumar developed a strong foundation in Indian classical and folk traditions across both music and dance. He later completed a Bachelor of Music (Honours) in Composition and Percussion at WAAPA and a Graduate Certificate in Film Scoring at Berklee College of Music. Kumar’s accolades include the Performing Arts WA Award for Best Composition or Arranging for Fully Sikh 2020, a Green Room Award for Once The Musical 2024, a 2025 nomination for Best Supporting Role and Best Composition for An Imaginary Life, and a 2026 nomination for Best Composition for Child. A passionate educator and collaborator, he continues to fuse cultures and art forms to create boundary-pushing, emotionally rich work.
Addendum: Marking Time (2026)
In July 2023, I accepted a permanent position as a lecturer at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design. I arrived with a future to point to, a desk of my own, and a place to be. I have a job that defines me. I now represent the university and am tasked with recruiting, fostering and exporting future generations of artists into a world of precarity.
When asked to restage this performance, I questioned whether my current employment places me outside the relational politics of casual labour that ‘On Time’ describes. Organisational infrastructures naturalise unevenness. Stability for some is often scaffolded on the flexibility of others. Security leans on contingency. The language of professionalism continues to disguise dependence on underpaid, overextended, contingent labour. There is no clean exit from this knowledge.
For permanent employees, recognition can become the sole claim to amelioration. Permanent work is often treated as visible proof that things have improved, even when the underlying conditions remain difficult. Recognition shifts: instead of merely being acknowledged as precarious, the worker is now recognised as legitimate, professional, settled, and employable. That recognition carries social and institutional value but can stop short of deeper change.
Permanent employment sounds complete, as though life has resolved itself through work. I am marked by a certain social coherence that is immediately understood. Bureaucracies soften. Applications become easier to complete. It becomes simpler to imagine rent, appointments, holidays, and repairs.
Permanent employment often brings legibility: I have become easier for institutions to understand. My time appears organised, my income credible, my identity coherent. I am no longer read as marginal or transitional. In this sense, recognition does ameliorate something. It becomes a sign that the problem has been solved simply because the worker now fits the normative model.
Permanence does not resolve precarity so much as reorganise it, shifting insecurity from the visible instability of hours and contracts to the less visible pressures of dependence, overwork, compliance, and disposability. The pressure remains. It changes register. It speaks in a different voice. It enters through policy, review, collegiality, performance, gratitude.
What this can hide is that full-time employment may still contain exhaustion, anxiety, dependency and submission to institutional norms that remain harmful. You are secure, but only if useful. Ongoing, but only while aligned. Permanent, but only within conditions that can still be revised, restructured, and redistributed. It may also obscure the broader structure by individualising the solution: you made it, therefore the system works. In that logic, the full-time worker is recognised not only by the institution but recruited into its story about fairness, mobility, and merit.
Speaking from a position of permanent employment does not settle the question of value in casual labour. Permanent work may genuinely improve life while still not resolving the logic of precarity —it may simply make one worker more recognisable.
– Sarah Rodigari
Supporters
Supported by PICA’s Director’s Circle and by Strategic Initiative Funding from the Western Australian Government’s Department of Creative Industries, Tourism and Sport.
Photos: On Labour: Four Live Works, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2026. Photo: Fionn Mulholland
