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Ioanna Sakellaraki
The Mark of a Terrible Sun


10/04/25-11/05/25


Opening reception: Thursday 10th Ap,  6-8pm

Disasters are the absolute event of history and any knowledge we have of them is built around, with and against the marks left behind them. The Mark of a Terrible Sun is an intimate portrait of the lands and people of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the most seismically and volcanically active zone in the world.

Stretching around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, this circular ring of disasters is a 40,000- kilometer zone that includes roughly 90 percent of all earthquakes and 75 percent of all active volcanoes across the globe. The first part of the project focuses on the lands and people under the shadow of the volcanoes situated on the southwest trench of the ring and more specifically on the part of the region of Melanesia including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, seeking to investigate how these ongoing disasters, as witnessed through archives and re-lived today, can shape a culture of resilience shared amongst the Melanesian communities impacted.

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. In this sense, the images blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction reflecting upon the possibilities an expanded photographic practice can offer in relation to the disaster as the prompt for future scenarios positioned in the gap between historical knowledge, presentation, the image and narration.


Catalogue coming soon

Ioanna Sakellaraki
(b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher currently working between Greece and Australia. 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 and an MA in Cultural Studies. Following her interest in inter-disciplinary critical theory in relation to visual arts, she was awarded an International Scholarship for undertaking her PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) at RMIT University in Melbourne.

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 and in 2021 received further funding from Arts Council England. 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 recent solo shows in Tokyo, Melbourne, Belfast, Braga, Greece 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. Her work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Collection. Her monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by GOST Books.


@ioannasakellaraki_photography_


https://ioannasakellaraki.com/