Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) will extend its second season for 2026 with two major performance programs, bringing together artists working across dance, poetry, performance, live writing and socially-engaged practice.

Taking place throughout PICA’s iconic building, this season will debut On Labour: Four Live Works by Grace Connors, Barbara Hostalek, Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa and Sarah Rodigari from 2-4 July. Later in the month, PICA will host the third annual presentation of Restore commissioned by STRUT Dance, featuring a double bill of contemporary dance works: Call, a new dance, vocal and live writing work created by local artist Ainslie Allan in collaboration with Annika Moses and Jo Pollitt, and Mickey by Brooke Stamp exploring the labour of dance through improvisation and live vocal processing performed in-situ with composer Daniel Jenatsch.

Together, these programs transform PICA’s galleries into spaces for movement, voice, reflection and exchange. Across both presentations, artists consider the conditions of contemporary life — from labour, precarity and survival to care, grief, endurance and collective responsibility.

On Labour, features a program of live performance informed by the practices and lived experiences of four contemporary artists working at the intersection of visual art, performance and the written word.

Unfolding across the PICA building, the program will be presented as a sequence of four distinct performance works, with audiences moving through different gallery spaces. Bringing the works together is a shared consideration of labour as both creative and economic activity, and the tensions that exist between the two.

A culmination of new and existing works, each artist in On Labour reflects on artistic precarity, debt, casualisation, identity, belonging, institutional power and the cost of sustaining a creative life. Presented over three nights, On Labour reimagines the gallery as a durational performance site, transforming constraint into a generative condition and inviting audiences to gain insight  into  the courage, fortitude and adaptability demanded of artists today.

Grace Connors’ work draws on performance lecture, stagecraft and clowning to examine debt, humiliation and the personal and structural forces that shape economic survival, while Sarah Rodigari responds to  the word “casual” and its relationship to labour, intimacy and performance, reflecting on the instability of casual employment through time, body and voice. 

Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa brings together music, poetry and lived experience to explore the financial and cultural realities of working as an independent artist, supported by musician Pavan Kumar Hari, who will play the dilruba, a 300-year-old Sikh string instrument. Barbara Hostalek offers a poetic and performative perspective on labour, exploring the conditions and the ebb and flow of the creative process. The piece features a performance from Ballet4Wellbeing founders Sandrine Delasalle and Aurelien Scannella, who will contribute a unique participatory element, integrating a seated ballet sequence within the live performances. 

Following the opening performance series, PICA will present Restore, an annual program commissioned by STRUT Dance, in the Central Gallery from 15–18 July 2026 with a double feature of premieres.

Call, created by Ainslie Allan in collaboration with Annika Moses and Jo Pollitt, is grounded in the artists’ enduring performance improvisation practices, with each bringing solo practices developed over multiple years. A world premiere, the work features layered, looped and live-generated choreography, voice and writing-as-dancing, the work seeks tenderness and deep listening amid the destabilisation and rupture of contemporary life.

The performance offers grieving-as-we-go as a courageous emotional response to living, listening and thriving amid personal and socio-political complexity. Rather than seeking resolution, Call returns again and again to repair and restoration as an active, ongoing and communal process. The work proposes embodied dis-armouring as a way of staying with uncertainty, offering an urgently warm call for connection in the midst of continuous aftermaths.

Mickey by Brooke Stamp is the second work in this double bill developed in collaboration with experimental sound artist, Daniel Jenatsch. A WA premiere following its Melbourne debut for Rising Festival at Buxton Contemporary in 2025, the piece investigates the psychic, emotional and physical labour of the dancer as a site of raw experimentation rather than polished form. Drawing on improvised movement, voice and live‑processed sound, the work reveals the hidden, subconscious impulses that shape choreographic practice, offering an emotionally and physically charged performance that unfolds differently each time.

Tickets for On Labour: Four Live Works are now on sale via: https://pica.org.au/whats-on/on-labour-four-live-works/ 

Tickets for Restore (Call and Mickey) are now on sale via: https://pica.org.au/whats-on/strut-dance-restore-2/ 

For more information on PICA’s 2026 Artistic Program and events, visit: pica.org.au