Sally Golding is an Australian-British artist known for her immersive audiovisual performances and participatory installations. Drawing from her background in expanded cinema and avant-garde music, she creates powerful sensory experiences designed to both disorient and seduce the spectator. Golding’s live sets unravel in the style of a ‘Happening’ to incorporate aspects of the performance space by blending discordant sonics and cracked lighting, often incorporating the audience themselves into her unstable audiovisual systems. She explores perception through intangible elements such as light and temporality, seeking abstracted meaning in ephemeral situations and generative systems.

Golding’s soundscapes are indivisible from the materials with which they are produced, summoning moments of excessive threshold and entropic decay that target the body’s nervous system. Her performances have mixed innovative ‘darkroom compositions’ that rework optical film sound as a form of psychoacoustic collage; pulsating sonified-screens which abstract architectural space; buzzing distributed AV synthesisers materialising on audience’s personal devices; lathe cut audio recordings inscribed onto silver foil; impastos of voice reactive colour fields; and generative feedback systems using amplified lighting and light sensitive audio incorporating repurposed camera flash units and sound-system-shattering laboratory strobe lights.

Golding is an inaugural recipient of the Oram Award (New BBC Radiophonic Workshop/PRS Foundation for Music) for women innovating in sound and creative technologies, and previously featured in the prestigious SHAPE Platform lineup for innovative music and audiovisual art in Europe. Her work has been recognised in publications including Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Senses of Cinema, Tate Modern, Oxford University Press, I.B Tauris/Bloomsbury and Palgrave Macmillan. Exhibitions and performances have included Tate Modern (UK), Tate Britain (UK), Digital Culture Centre (MX), Serralves Museum (PT), Whitstable Biennale (UK), Metro Arts (AU), Institute of Modern Art (AU), Sound of Stockholm (SE), Cafe OTO (UK), Fylkingen 80th Anniversary Festival (SE), Supernormal (UK), Abandon Normal Devices (UK), Liquid Architecture (AU), SONICA (SI), San Francisco Cinematheque (US), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (AU), Contemporary Art Centre (LT), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Contemporary Art Tasmania (AU), South London Gallery (UK) and Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art (NO).

Commissions solo and in collaboration with UK artist and musician Matt Spendlove (Spatial) have included an immersive surround sound and VR experience for the Museum of the Moving Image (US); live-to-air performance for Radiophrenia at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (UK); a club-to-cinema experience for Tyneside Cinema (UK); and immersive film performances for Melbourne International Film Festival (AU) and CA2M/Contemporary Art Madrid (ES).

Taking the audience on a hallucinogenic dark carnival ride, and “delivering full spectrum sensory overload” (The Wire), this will be one of Sally Golding’s rare Australian performances in recent years.

The set will also feature a sound design collaboration with UK artist Matt Spendlove aka Spatial.