Volume features two major new art commissions that will transform the Art Gallery’s Tank space through moving image, light, electronic music and dance, by Australian dancer and choreographer Angela Goh and UK-based Australian filmmaker and artist Sam Smith.

A concave space

UK-based Australian artist-filmmaker Sam Smith’s A concave space transforms the Art Gallery’s underground Tank space into a futuristic, neon wetland featuring multiple synchronised projections that spill across a 40-metre expanse.

Starring April Lin 林森 as a beautiful and eerie sci-fi avatar, this immersive experience explores the Tank’s material history as a Second World War oil bunker in light of fossil-fuelled environmental crisis. Reaching out through vegetal eyes, the narrator makes kin with microbes and mycelial membranes, streams and soils.

Expect shimmering visions of oil slicks, evocative incantations by acclaimed speculative writer Ama Josephine Budge, field recordings by Yuin artist and musician JWPATON, and underwater cinematography shot in collaboration with Sonia Levy.

Axe Arc Echo

In this major new commission for the Tank, dancer and choreographer Angela Goh performs her own kind of epic – an unflinching physical journey that perseveres against intense sonic forces and the vastness of the space itself. Summoning and subverting stories of descent, from hidden underworlds, geological wonders and buried histories, Goh uses her body to contort the logic of direction. As she flickers in and out of view across the Tank’s forest of columns, a world is revealed where forward and backward has twisted into upwards and down. 

Axe Arc Echo unfolds within an all-consuming environment created by Goh’s acclaimed collaborators, electronic producer and composer Corin Ileto and lighting designer Govin Ruben. 

Axe Arc Echo 2023 is supported with funds provided by The Keir Foundation, with additional support provided through residency programs at Critical Path, Sydney and Shedhalle, Zürich.