The Seven Circuits of a Pearl
BY IOANNA SAKELLARAKI
This peripatetic inquiry is realized through a series of night walks across a wide range of Australian landscapes mapping out the transmutable body of nature as a meditative field. Occupying new meanings each time through the walking as a form of grounding thought while moving with it and making something out of it, its residue becomes what remains but empowers. Characterized by their own interruption, when zones of landscapes pause and rebegin by merging into a new form of totality, the fields of these walks are moving bodies themselves; a form of energy that is transferable to words, images, and sounds enabling them to become the toponyms of new constellations. From the west to the east coast, there is no crossing without encountering the desert as the connector in the in-between, the center of Australia; the interior of the continent, and the seventy percent of its entirety, a landscape that epitomizes a ‘before- us’ quality as a site of ancient myth, spiritual dimension, and cultural rebirth and which had, for centuries, been seen as a ‘’terra nullius’’ in the journals of masculine adventurers who tried to cross it. The desert, this ‘’hideous blank’’, as several of the early explorers had called it, is, for the purpose of this work, envisioned like an outdoor thinking room during my night walks; the site for ‘forming aporias’ on the physical space of my images. These forms are for me exploration devices of the unknown; they operate in their hiddenness and at the same time it is through hiding that they invite me to find them anew, fully and wholly.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She is a graduate of Journalism with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and an MA in Cultural Studies. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was the winner of a Sony World Photography Award in 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with recent solo shows in Tokyo, Melbourne, Belfast, Braga, Greece and Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, TIME, Aesthetica and Wallpaper and journals including The Guardian, Financial Times and Deutsche Welle. She has been invited as a guest speaker in the Martin Parr Foundation and the London Institute of Photography amongst others. Her work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Collection. Her monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by London- based publisher GOST Books.
Website
https://ioannasakellaraki.com/