Adelaide artist Ida Sophia wins $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for Beachport baptism video
A video that recreates an artist’s experience of her father’s baptism at Beachport has won the Art Gallery of SA’s $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize. See the pictures.
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The $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize has been won by Adelaide artist Ida Sophia with a performance video which recreates the experience of her late father’s baptism at Beachport.
Australia’s richest award for contemporary artists aged under 40, the competition is held every two years by the Art Gallery of SA and funded by the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, established by the late cultural philanthropists.
Brompton based Sophia, 33, said the win would enable her to “make bigger and more ambitious works”.
“This is an immense aid to being able to do that, on a really high level,” she said.
Born at Mount Gambier in 1989, Sophia is a former student of The Marina Abramovic Institute in Greece and uses hybrid media, sculpture and installations to create her works.
She works from personal experiences to investigate “uncomfortable states” and says representation of pain in art is essential for the viewer to reflect on the human faculties of “reason, will and belief”.
Witness is a 4K video inspired by Sophia’s childhood experience of seeing her father’s baptism, which she believed meant that he loved Jesus Christ more than her.
It was shot in a single take at The Pool of Siloam in Wirmalngrang/Beachport on the state’s southeast coast.
AGSA director Rhana Devenport said Sophia was “clearly at a pivotal point in her career”.
“Her winning work Witness is technically and conceptually resolved, capturing the breadth of her practice to this point,” Ms Devenport said.
Sophia said her video’s repetitive and intense act of submergence and uplifting takes the act of baptism to a level of “relentless obsession”.
The artist said it suggests how actions of vain hope can be gruelling, violent and futile, for participant and witness alike.
Prize judges Aaron Seeto, director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Nusantara in Jakarta, Perth-based artist-producer Erin Coates, and Tarnanthi artistic director Nici Cumpston, were unanimous in their decision.
“Witness, is sophisticated in concept and deeply emotive in subject, successfully embodying and transmitting a very visceral experience through video,” said Mr Seeto.
Finalists’ works will be on display in the Ramsay Art Prize 2023 exhibition at the Art Gallery from May 27 until August 27.
The public can vote for its $15,000 People’s Choice Prize until August 11.
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