Artist wins $100k Ramsay Prize with submersion video

By Liz Hobday in Melbourne

PERFORMANCE artist Ida Sophia has gained the $100,000 Ramsay Prize with a video of her being repeatedly submerged underwater.

“Witness” was shot in a single take at salt lake The Pool of Siloam in SA’s Beachport.

The Ramsay Prize, awarded on the Artwork Gallery of SA on Friday, is Australia’s greatest award for artists beneath 40 and comes with the identical prize cash because the Archibald Prize.

Sophia is a former pupil on the Marina Abramovic Institute in Greece, the place she studied the strategies of the world’s most well-known efficiency artist.

Within the successful art work, Sophia is repeatedly submerged and lifted out of the water as a approach of analyzing baptism and what the artist sees as its painful penalties.

The Adelaide artist, 34, noticed her father baptised as a younger youngster and stated she felt he liked Jesus greater than he liked her.

“Regardless of being agnostic, I responded by pretending to be extremely religious, blindly looking for to regain his love,” she stated in an artist’s assertion.

Sophia selected SA’s Pool of Siloam as a result of it’s the place she swam as a baby and is called after a biblical website the place Jesus is claimed to have restored a person’s sight, reflecting her makes an attempt to “see” Christ like her father did.

The efficiency and video present actions of useless hope will be exhaustive, violent and in the end futile, she stated.

“Ida Sophia is clearly at a pivotal level in her profession – her successful work Witness is technically and conceptually resolved, capturing the breadth of her apply up to now,” gallery director Rhana Devenport stated.

The Ramsay Artwork Prize 2023 exhibition runs from Saturday till August 27 on the Artwork Gallery of SA.