Artist
Ioanna Sakellaraki
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 was recently awarded a Doctoral Scholarship for undertaking her PhD in Art after graduating from an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was named Student Photographer of the Year by Sony World Photography Awards 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 a recent solo show at the European Month of Photography in Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and journals including The Guardian and Deutsche Welle. Her first monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by GOST Books.
The Truth is in the Soil
Ioanna Sakellaraki’s conceptual practice positions photography as ontological proposition within a nexus of fiction, collage and the archive. She investigates the capacity of images not only to document an underlying reality, but also to endlessly extend our perception; mobilizing the domains of time and space and how a personal experience of grief becomes a universal journey through memory and memory loss.
The Truth is in the Soil is a 5-year exploration of grief as an elegy to her father and the dying tradition of mourning in Greece. After her personal loss, Sakellaraki’s own grieving process became the lens through which she investigates the collective mourning in Greek society, the intersection of ancestral rituals, private trauma and the passage of time. Further inspired by the last communities of mourners on the Mani Peninsula of Greece as the doyennes of a dying tradition, the work incorporates a new kind of subjectivity, intimacy, and criticism, exploring mortuary rituals as a way of humans adapting to death. To her, these images work as vehicles for mourning perished ideals of vitality, prosperity and belonging, attempting to tell something further than their subjects by creating a space where death can exist.
Through both manual and digital processes, she adds layers to what has been documented as real, rerouting the viewer through existing and imaginary spaces. Silhouettes of mourners gazing at mountain ranges appear weathered, time-worn and fragile with cracks and damage, whilst other images are cut-out, marked and reassembled, melding past with present. There is a versality throughout the imagery, shifting from black and white to colour, the abstract to the figurative. Finally, Sakellaraki’s work acts as a visual representation of the gradual and irreversible loss of the departed in the mind of the living, and simultaneous reconstruction of memories.
We first met Greek photographer and architect Stefania Orfanidou at a bookmaking workshop. Her delicate compositions and intriguing images play like music when laid out on pages.
Meanwhile, Ioanna Sakellaraki is another talented Greek artist with whom we’ve been familiar for some time. Her first monograph, The Truth is in the Soil, deals with personal issues, mourning and Greek society: subjects that are close to our hearts.
Another of our nominees is Czech photographer Josef Janošík, whose dark body of work resonates greatly with Void’s aesthetic interests. In his work, Janošík returns to half-forgotten childhood memories, and to the places where his childhood was spent.
Greek artist Dafni Melidou has a similar sense of creativity and experimentation in her work. Though currently unpublished, a number of her series – like The fossils, the ashes and other remains of existence – have the right ingredients for an intriguing photobook.
Beyond our base in Athens, Void also operates a small branch in Reykjavík, Iceland. With this in mind, we were keen to showcase a local artist; Þórsteinn Svanhildarson caught our attention with his touching portraiture of local youths, as well as with his beautiful book production.