Ida Sophia wins Ramsay Art Prize at Art Gallery of SA

Endurance, resilience, hope and her father’s love inspired Adelaide artist Ida Sophia to make her video installation, Witness, winner of a $100,000 art prize.

Ida Sophia with her video work Witness, winner of the $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize. Picture: Keryn Stevens

Ida Sophia was seven years old when she watched her father, newly divorced, and newly ­received into the church, as he underwent a full-immersion ­baptism.

For Ida it was not an uplifting occasion. In her imagination she saw her father’s affection being transferred from her to God.

“I understood in that moment that I was sort of separated from him, and I perceived that I had lost my position as his favourite,” she said. “I started to act in a faux-­religious way, to regain his love that I thought I had lost.”

Sophia, 33, a performance artist, has used her artistic practice to work through those feelings of displacement. The resulting work, a 12-minute video called Witness, on Friday was named the winner of Australia’s richest award for contemporary artists under the age of 40.

The $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize, established in the name of Adelaide art patrons James and Diana Ramsay, is awarded biennially by the Art Gallery of SA.

In 2019 Sophia joined a week-long workshop at the Marina Abramovic Institute in Greece, where she learned the techniques of endurance art. It involved fasting, silence and long walks, and Sophia discovered her capacity for long-form performance was greater than she thought.

She made a durational piece called Regret in which she sat for 28 days before a slowly decaying display of flowers. It was a ­response to her regret at not being present when her father, Alister, died in 2013.

In her award-winning work, Sophia underwent a full-body ­immersion – like her late father’s baptism – at the Pool of Siloam, a salt lake in Beachport, on SA’s Limestone Coast. The video shows her being dunked in the water repeatedly, each time with greater force.

She said she wanted viewers to experience the intensity of the ­ordeal, as if they were holding their breath for the 12 minutes of the piece. Sophia’s work was chosen from 27 finalists – all are on display at the AGSA from Saturday until August 27 – by judges Aaron Seeto, Erin Coates and Nici Cumpston, who were impressed with its “sophisticated concept, personal symbolism, and emotional connection to the site of performance”.

Witness, Sophia said, was about ritual and the “vain hope” of regaining her father’s love. “Of course, after doing this performance, it was very clear to me that I never actually lost it,” she said.