Ioanna Sakellaraki 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.
One of the 7 mixed media portraits of Anna, the unknown-to-me woman with the pearl necklace; my father`s ex-wife as first encountered in his archive, created by magnifying fragments of sliced pearls under light microscopy and scan electron microscopy at the lab.
Questions around how to engage, dismantle and transform this work`s multiple spaces, inpired the first version of my art book object `Nautilus: The Chambered Self` that is primarily concerned with ideas on repetition, fallibility and fragmentation of the archival, material and symbolic histories involved in my making.
Its geometrucally refined anatomy hosts an archive of my spiraling attempts to activate my late father’s secrets in his archive, articulating a space marked by the intimacy and fragility that my otherworldly encounter with them opened up in my art practice.
Fragment A, The Seven Circuits of a Pearl [Between 7 sets of labial tentacles and a spadix], 2025, sliced Nautilus pompilius ancestral cephalopod`s shell from my father’s archive, 28 photographic and mixed media artworks from the series, fine art paper, perspex, silk thread, Edition Unique
You can discover more on my website via Link in Bio > Projects > Limited Edition
Currently exhibited as part of `Surrender to the Dreamers` at Museum fur Fotografie in Berlin until 27 April
@analoguenow
@emopberlin
#nautilus #archival #archives #pearls #contemporarywomenartists #familyarchives #ioannasakellaraki #pearling #shells #artbook #conceptual #sea #geology #sail #specimen #microscopy #pearl #luster #research #PhD #practiceasresearch #artphotography #cephalopods #surreal #underwater
![One of the 7 mixed media portraits of Anna, the unknown-to-me woman with the pearl necklace; my father's ex-wife as first encountered in his archive, created by magnifying fragments of sliced pearls under light microscopy and scan electron microscopy at the lab.
Questions around how to engage, dismantle and transform this work's multiple spaces, inpired the first version of my art book object 'Nautilus: The Chambered Self' that is primarily concerned with ideas on repetition, fallibility and fragmentation of the archival, material and symbolic histories involved in my making.
Its geometrucally refined anatomy hosts an archive of my spiraling attempts to activate my late father’s secrets in his archive, articulating a space marked by the intimacy and fragility that my otherworldly encounter with them opened up in my art practice.
Fragment A, The Seven Circuits of a Pearl [Between 7 sets of labial tentacles and a spadix], 2025, sliced Nautilus pompilius ancestral cephalopod's shell from my father’s archive, 28 photographic and mixed media artworks from the series, fine art paper, perspex, silk thread, Edition Unique
You can discover more on my website via Link in Bio > Projects > Limited Edition
Currently exhibited as part of 'Surrender to the Dreamers' at Museum fur Fotografie in Berlin until 27 April
@analoguenow
@emopberlin
#nautilus #archival #archives #pearls #contemporarywomenartists #familyarchives #ioannasakellaraki #pearling #shells #artbook #conceptual #sea #geology #sail #specimen #microscopy #pearl #luster #research #PhD #practiceasresearch #artphotography #cephalopods #surreal #underwater](https://ioannasakellaraki.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
Here some impressions from `Surrender to the Dreamers` at the Museum for Photography in Berlin together with artists @mdborowski
@caidongdong @anais.boudot
@ria.wank @timotheusbuettner
The exhibition curated @claducbo and @stanka.mono and organised @analoguenow offers a perspective on photography as a medium that transcends the limits of the visible and ventures beyond mere sensory perception.
Through hands-on manipulation and experimentation, the featured artists excavate family secrets, shed light on forgotten women, and reconstruct missing archives, among other pursuits.
The show is running concurrently with FOTOGAGA. Max Ernst and Photography. A visit from the Würth Collection, which includes an extraordinary collection of the surrealist artist`s works over the years.
I hope you can get to visit during the coming weeks. I am honoured to be part of it 🙏
Museum fur Fotografie | Jebensstraße 2, Berlin
On until 27 April
Open daily 11AM-7PM (except for Mondays)
Part of @emopberlin
#emop #Berlin #art #photomuseum #exhibition #analoguenow #ioannasakellaraki #thesevencircuitsofapearl #Berlin #europeanmonthofphotography #surrealism #maxernst #photographer #contemporaryart #experimental #conceptualart #creative #museumofphotography #archives #familyarchive #archivo #archivalresearch #practiceasresearch
Let me introduce you to my artist book/ object: "Nautilus: The Chambered Self" currently exhibited at the Museum fur Fotografie in Berlin until 27 April.
When a specimen of Nautilus pompilius (deriving from Ancient Greek little sailor) belonging to a family of ancestral cephalopods was discovered in a cardboard box, part of my late father`s archive marked as ‘Specimen: Other’, stored in our Athenian apartment`s basement, little did I know that its vessel would allow for the final dive in the muddy waters of my research with its fossil as an active body of history embracing its dynamic, deep and dark spaces.
Holding it for the first time reminded me of the way the mollusc emerges out of its shell in an embryonic form and it unavoidably made me dream about the ways that my project’s fragmentary lives could be transforming between its geometrically refined structures.
With this idea in mind and its chambered spiral shell as my view, I started fragmenting Nautilus while studying its core through archives and scientific resources but also based on observations of the actual specimen. I then decided to nest my work within it so I could continue to weave my way through its circuits; the chambers I have inhabited, grew out from and re- populated anew in my ways of sailing and, at times, sinking deep under the ocean of my work.
In the meantime please go visit the Unique Editions of:
Fragment A, The Seven Circuits of a Pearl [Between 7 sets of labial tentacles and a spadix], 2025, sliced Nautilus pompilius shell from my father`s archive, fine art paper, perspex, silk thread
[A spiral of tissue lined with 28 tiny teeth], 2025, Internal spiral of Nautilus pompilius shell from my father`s archive, fine art paper, perspex, silk thread, clothbound panels, debossed labyrinth motif with golden foil
Surrender to the Dreamers @analoguenow
@emopberlin until 27 April at Museum fur Fotografie
Learn more about Nautilus on my site via Link in Bio>Projects >Limited Edition
#Nautilus #artistbook #shells #ocean #ioannasakellaraki #archive #surrealism #artphotography #contemporaryart #fossil #dream #thesevencircuitsofapearl #sculpture #artwork #specimen #practiceasresearch
Last week`s panel discussion @photovogue on magical approaches to documentary photography reconnected me to the foundational concerns of my work "The Mark of a Terrible Sun" (Melanesia 20022-ongoing) attempting to draw an intimate portrait of the disasters that have been lived in and haunted these places as well as the ones that keep on happening and are yet to come.
I began working on this series when I could not anymore deal with the disastrous discoveries in my family archives. Drawing from the double indexicality of photography placing us both outward to the world and inward towards ourselves, I started thinking outside of/from that family drama and questioning origins and ends of the disaster as a term that becomes itself the shifting debris sustaining the fear. The immemorable that is a fugitive encounter. An interrogation perpetually recommenced as a changing fiction that marks its repetition in history.
Between 2022-2024, I travelled to Melanesia following a series of volcanic eruptions, and I began exploring the southwest trench of the Pacific Ring of Fire.Stretching around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, this circular ring of disasters is a 40,000- kilometer zone that includes roughly 90% of all earthquakes and 75% of all active volcanoes across the globe.
Photographed under the lava and ashes of past and ongoing volcanic activity and the historical remnants of the Pacific war in the region, the work is primarily concerned with the obscure traces of the disaster as an interspace dealing with ideas of destruction and survival and the exploration of heterotopias that might creatively synthesize new composites and assemblages of interpretation.
I look forward to continuing working towards the next stage of realisation of the series while preparing the first Solo Show of it @hillvalegallery next month!
#themarkofaterriblesun #volcanoes #disaster #melanesia #pacific #ioannasakellaraki #genesis #volcanic #papuanewguinea #ringoffire #documentary #landscapephotography #disasters #disasterrelief #contemporarywomenartists #documentaryphotography #photovogue #fires #photovogue #erruption #volcanic #fires #burn #explosion #destruction #terror
