Sophie Dumaresq & Rabieh Gebeile

About the work

This special edition of the endurance performance work Beached as Bro…(I love you) is collaborative, experimental and bittersweet duet between the Australian artist Sophie Dumaresq and the Lebanese artist Rabih Gabeile.

The performance is staged on the lakes edge, with the sun setting behind the Australian War Memorial in the background. Sophie Dumaresq lays inside the clear plexiglass belly of her handmade animatronic seven metre-long shark. As the sun begins to set and the performance starts, the shark moves along to the beat, appearing to sing along with Rabih Gabeile as he sings his own reinterpretation of the Beach Boys song “Don’t Worry Baby.”

The work is inspired by the artists’ friendship, artistic kinship and collaboration, sustained across different hemispheres through voice notes and dm’s. It reflects on the unspoken gift—and emotional labour—behind being able to say and hear the words “Don’t Worry Baby.”

Grounded in their shared dark humour and anti-genocidal, anti-ecocidal and anti-war politics, the performance creates space to reflect on and grieve global politics, history and current events, as well as the loss of possible futures. It imagines a future in which we can work collectively towards a just and liveable world.

About the artist

Rabih Gebeile

Audiovisual and multimedia creator is a Lebanese artist whose sound and visual universe oscillates between analogue rock roots and experimental. Rabih was born in Tyre, in a Lebanon torn apart by civil war. From 2022 to 2024, he toured with the Lebanese collective Yazan for the play ‘Transit Tripoli’, during which he performed the soundtrack live on the stages of Berlin, Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli and Beirut. In 2025, Rabih composed the soundtrack for ‘Dead Dog’, a feature film by director Sarah Francis.

 

Sophie Dumaresq

Sophie Dumaresq is an Australian interdisciplinary artist who explores the politics of care within different landscapes through automata and materiality as both performer and physical maker. Working across photography, video installation, sculpture and performance, her work explores what it is to try and communicate in a universe filled with beings whose brains, existence and or bodies are built inherently differently to that of your own. She has exhibited and performed nationally at festivals such as Dark Mofo, Vivid and Bondi Sculpture by the Sea.

 

Rabih and Sophie first met through the local Paris arts and music scene while they were both living in Paris during the 2010s.