Gomma Photography Grant 2023
The Land of Error
Photographer
Ioanna Sakellaraki
The Land of Error
22 Feb, 2024
The future is split between manmade antithesis and parodies of human prediction. This is where fiction finds its justified place. The observations of reason and imagination have created a doubtfulness about ends and beginnings, matter and spirit, language and image. The series overall attempts to create a language of an ending world by staging several ‘’topoi’’ of apocalyptic vision, through the idea of a possible revelation: what is past and passing and to come. This sense of an ending underlines our ways of making sense of the world by placing our imagination always at the end of an era. In Greek there is a word, ‘’Kairos’’, expressing the restlessness of temporality; our way of bundling together the perception of the present, the memory of the past and the expectation of the future. The work attempts to reanimate this notion of ‘’Kairos’’, in relation to the end, and the inescapable new beginning. The series has been shot alongside Oodnadatta Track, Australia's unsealed 617 km outback road. The deserted landscapes, occasionally interrupted by the light leaks the film has been exposed to, create a language of thought that is spoken elliptically, as trace of a dialogue with oneself; an anonymity, an escape
About the photographer
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 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 Gomma Grant, 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 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 monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by London- based publisher GOST Books.
