Maintenance in Feminist Art and Performance: A Conversation with Astrid Lorange and Sarah Rodigari

How do acts of performance reframe the time of labour and its gendered divisions?

Presented alongside Michaela Gleave’s exhibition Event Horizon, this panel brings together writer Astrid Lorange, and artist Sarah Rodigari in conversation with Zoe Theodore, Curator – Programs, Artspace.

Exploring themes of maintenance, endurance and repetition, Gleave’s new performance work Universal Maintenance unfolds through ongoing acts of adjustment and repair: tuning sonic environments, resetting drifting sound loops, tending organic matter, and reordering documents to sustain the exhibition’s shifting spatial balance. Through these gestures, the work foregrounds forms of labour that are often invisible yet essential to sustaining everyday life.

Drawing on feminist performance histories and contemporary debates around artistic, domestic and reproductive labour, the discussion considers how maintenance labour intersects with gendered divisions of work, ecological strain, and the precarity of labour under neoliberal conditions.

This panel considers this renewed attention, asking: what does it mean to maintain the universe, or even the planet, and how might contemporary art contribute to this work?

The program will be followed by a scheduled performance of Universal Maintenance.