Holding the Line is a multidisciplinary performance and installation work developed through a research process grounded in Winter Gaze, an arthouse film series curated by Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs. Together, these two components form a unified investigation into how we look, who is seen, and what remains invisible within systems of care and crisis.

Winter Gaze examines the cinematic gaze through landmark experimental and narrative films, exploring how perception, duration, and intimacy shape meaning. This public program provides the conceptual foundation for the performance work, offering critical tools for understanding the ethics and politics of looking.

Holding the Line extends this inquiry into lived experience, focusing on the hidden emotional labour of frontline workers supporting women affected by sexual and gendered violence across homelessness and justice systems. Through sound, movement, repetition, and durational form, the work makes visible the weight these workers carry daily — labour that is essential yet often unseen.

Together, the two parts create a single project that bridges research and artistic practice. Cinema becomes a method for examining the gaze; performance becomes a way to embody its social consequences. The project invites audiences to consider how women’s labour is viewed, how systems frame care, and what it means to witness with responsibility.

This is not a story of individual resilience, but of structural strain — and the urgent need to see, value, and support the labour that holds others in moments of crisis.

Scholar in Residence: Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs, University of Sydney
Auteur: Michelle St Anne