Listening with your body: New music and performance in 3 parts

Humanities by Laxlan Petras & the Australian Art Orchestra

TarraWarra Museum of Art is delighted to present the Australian premiere of Humanities, an experimental opera by Melbourne-born, Berlin-based Laxlan Petras, along with a new suite of specially created compositions by the Australian Art Orchestra.

Throughout the evening, audiences will encounter live performance across the site, encouraging an embodied sensorial response to music and dance.

Part I: Music in the Museum

Commencing at 4pm, the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) will perform an improvised set of music under Artistic Director Aaron Choulai’s SonoKinetic Conducting framework in response to artworks in the exhibition, Rose Nolan: Breathing Helps at the TarraWarra Museum of Art.

Part II: Sunset Interlude

Audiences will then be invited to experience the last sunset of Winter ‘standard time’ with complimentary refreshments overlooking Wurundjeri Country. TarraWarra’s unique architecture will then be activated by a series of solo performances by AAO musicians who will create live improvised responses to the TarraWarra Museum’s public spaces and sculptures.

Part III: Humanities

As the sun sets visitors will then be invited into the Eva and Marc Besen Centre for the Australian Premiere of Melbourne-born Berlin-based Laxlan Petras’ new experimental opera and performance work Humanities.

Humanities is a collaborative live performance originally conceived by artists Laxlan Petras, Yasmin Saleh and Amber Fasquelle that premiered at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in August 2025. The  piece combines  opera with spatial installation elements. Saleh performs solo wearing an amplified suit of mirrors, with trained and untrained vocal performances accompanying her. Performed in-the-round, Humanities consists of a sequence of charged encounters—live tableaux where bodies hesitate between control and passivity, intimacy and estrangement.  Throughout the performance, the question of what constitutes ‘the human’ is neither affirmed nor dissolved but held open in fragile suspension, as performers oscillate between embodiment and image, between agency and exposure.

Cost: $35

Bus: $10 (pre-book your return bus from Federation Square to TarraWarra)

Complimentary refreshments are included

Where: Commencing in TarraWarra Museum and concluding within The Centre.

Limited tickets. Bookings essential.

Humanities is generously supported by:

Creative Australia
Goethe Institut London
Callie’s, Berlin
Berlin Atonal

Laxlan Petras, Yasmin Saleh, and Amber Fasquelle

Humanities is an experimental operatic project by German-based artists Laxlan Petras, Amber Fasquelle and Yasmin Saleh. Its first iteration was shown at Berlin Atonal’s Universal Metabolism exhibition in August, 2023. The trio worked together on a new iteration for ICA London which premiered August, 2025.

Petras’ work is rooted in his biography and his practice embraces an array of media that provide space for intimacy, desire and identity. Fasquelle is an interdisciplinary vocal artist, performing in opera houses as well as contemporary contexts. She explores characters and musical history through site-specific interventions with the voice. Saleh is an actor, activist and television producer advocating for diversity, mental health and disability rights. She has performed in film, opera, television and musical theatre for several companies in Europe and abroad. Collectively, their practices look at both mundane and transcendental forms of human coexistence.

The Australian Art Orchestra

The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) is Australia’s premier creative music ensemble. Celebrating improvisation as a practice that connects us across borders of culture and art forms, AAO seeks to define a unified musical language – representative of the diversity of artists and artistic practice in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific. Through cross-cultural collaborations, interdisciplinary projects and works that explore new creative territories, AAO interrogates the spaces in between improvised and notated forms, finding new pathways of experimentation across musical languages, artistic disciplines and cultures. AAO celebrates the vibrant and contemporary culture of all Australians, and is a vehicle to explore shared and new traditions with our regional neighbours.