The Truth is in the Soil is a compelling, intense body of work about grief and mourning rituals in today’s Greek communities. Sparked by her father’s death, her own grieving process became the lens through which to successfully look into the collective mourning in Greek society, the intersection of ancestral rituals, private trauma and passage of time. The beautiful photography brings the viewer in a limbo between the real and the imaginary, having us look into the void of separation and loss.

Elisa Medde, FOAM Magazine

In this hybrid photography work, the Greek artist Ioanna Sakellaraki incorporates a new kind of subjectivity, intimacy, and criticism about death and loss. Perfectly merging performance and staged emotions, Ioanna has developed and broadened the language of photography as she reflects about memory, religion and mythology. The Truth is in the Soil is a dense and moving body of work: a deep contribution to the collection of tales of human struggle for meaning. She shows a broad emotional range, with pain, loss, empathy and beauty side by side.

Ângela Ferreira, Museu De Fotografia Brazil

In editing film, Sakellaraki has established similarly intricate rituals. Some of her mixed-media images transport the mourners to remote landscapes, showing only the black back sides of their garments as they gaze at mountain ranges and roiling tides. In other cases, their silhouettes appear to have decomposed, as though over time, into the very texture of their surroundings: a chain-link fence, an aging vase, a cave wall etched with chalk drawings. Sakellaraki has recast a few of the images themselves as artifacts, altering their surfaces to include cracks that suggest the delicacy and compressed depth of fossils. Her work projects a pronounced mournfulness at a time when funerary rites across the world have been disrupted, leaving the dying and the bereaved to suffer alone.

Eren Orbey, The New Yorker

Sakellaraki’s images are haunting, giving rise to contemplation without being morbid. There is a strong cultural flow of traditions being handed down to each generation. A passing of time that also seems timeless.

Kai-Lu Hsiung, RSA Films