What Listening Knows creatively interrogates different concepts around the act of listening, as if listening were the primary mode of sensing the world. Across three spectacular screens, the camera choreography is both grounded and ungrounded, imbued with an acoustic consciousness. Accompanied by a highly-detailed soundscape, the camera twists and tilts across lumpy hillsides, dips into an insect world, then levitates towards a tilted cloudy sky. Individuals appear as field recordists, trailing microphones and recording devices through cornfields, scanning anthills and ancient trees. But not all viewpoints are human. As the screens shift from macro to micro perspectives, we see that humans are perhaps not the only ones listening. Leber and Chesworth’s imagined environment is alive with hidden forces.
BY Sonia Leber David Chesworth (AU)
Sonia Leber and David Chesworth are known for their distinctive installations using video, sound, architecture and public participation. Developed through expansive research in places undergoing social change, Leber and Chesworth’s works are speculative and archaeological, responding to architectural, social and technological settings. Their highly detailed, conceptual videoworks emerge from the real but exist significantly in the realm of the imaginary. Leber and Chesworth’s artworks have been shown in the central exhibitions of the 56th Venice Biennale: All The World’s Futures (2015), the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire (2014) and a parallel exhibition of the 5th Moscow Biennale (2013). Leber and Chesworth were awarded the Substation Contemporary Art Prize (2016); Gold Coast Art Prize (2014); and Screengrab International Media Arts Award (2014). They were finalists in the Blake Prize (2016); Incinerator Art Award for Social Change (2016 & 2018); and the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (2011). They have been commissioned to create site-specific works for public spaces in Australia, New Zealand, Wales, and Slovenia. Collections include Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of Western Australia; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne; Gold Coast City Gallery; Mildura Arts Centre; and Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
