As part of the opening programs for Event Horizon, Michaela Gleave will initiate her first Universal Maintenance performance, an ongoing series devised for her project at Artspace. In Universal Maintenance Gleave undertakes acts of care—tuning the space through sonic interventions, resetting sound loops as they drift out of phase, tending soil and organic matter, curating and re-ordering documents, inflating balloons to restore balance within the spatial and atmospheric field. In establishing this sense of impermanence and continual adjustment, the artist’s labour becomes a means of holding Event Horizon, and by extension, the universe itself in a state of provisional equilibrium.

Michaela Gleave is an Australian artist based on Bediagal/Wangal Country, Sydney. Her practice is grounded in long-form, research-driven projects and spans installation, performance, sound, video, photography, sculpture, and digital and online works. Working across art, science, and philosophy, Gleave explores how knowledge is formed at the edges of certainty, and how human, planetary, and technological systems are entangled across time, scale, and lived experience. Her projects frequently engage material processes, duration, and spatial choreography to make perceptible forces that operate beyond ordinary human perception.

Gleave’s work has been presented widely in Australia and internationally, including Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom, Austria, South Africa, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Iceland, the United States, and Mexico. She has developed major performance and installation works for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane, Dark Mofo, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Bristol Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Carriageworks, and Gertrude Contemporary. Her international residencies include CERN, Switzerland; ISCP, New York; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; and NES, Iceland, alongside Australian residencies at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science; Sydney Observatory, the Powerhouse Museum; Artspace; and Bundanon. In 2015, Gleave won the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize and in 2013 was awarded a Creative Australia Fellowship. Permanent installations of her work have been commissioned by the Bendigo Art Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, and The Rechabite. She is currently a resident artist at the TWT Creative Precinct.