Performance video by Ida Sophia wins South Australia's Ramsay Prize – nation's biggest for artists under 40
Ida Sophia with Witness, her performance video that won the Art Gallery of South Australia's 2023 $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize – Australia’s biggest award for artists under 40.
Image courtesy Saul Steed
Adelaide-based artist Ida Sophia won the Art Gallery of South Australia's 2023 $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for Witness, a single-take performance video of her being repeatedly submerged to recreate a baptism at The Pool of Siloam in Beachport, on South Australia's Limestone Coast.
Sophia, 33, was picked unanimously as winner of Australia’s biggest prize for artists under 40 by a panel of national and international judges. The prize, set up in the name of South Australia’s leading cultural philanthropists James Ramsay and Diana Ramsay, was for a work in any medium including sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, installation and the moving image.
Sophia’s video was influenced by her childhood experience of seeing her father's baptism and how she felt her father loved Jesus more than herself: "When I was seven years old, my parents split and I felt that my position as my father's favourite had been sort of replaced by religion.” But Sophia said that, in filming the video, in which she was repeatedly dunked for 31 minutes, she realised she hadn’t lost the love of her father.
Sophia, as a performance artist, worked with a hybrid media, sculpture and installations and drew on using the body. Beginning with personal narratives, her work was characterised by “conceptual examinations of widely shared, uncomfortable human experiences such as hope, regret, familial tension and grief. Ultimately, the works construct a capacity to accept, understand and process pain within reason, will and belief”.
Sophia developed her practice through rigorous training with The Marina Abramovic Institute (Greece, 2019), Guillermo Gomez Peña’s La Pocha Nostra troupe (Italy, 2020), performance art studies) with BBB Johannes Deimling (online, 2020) and Vest&Page’s Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy, 2020). Sophia was mentored by performance artists and curators, among them Joseph Morgan Schofield, Joshua Soafer, Voin de Voin and Boris Kostadinov.
She exhibited in multiple shows locally and internationally including The Art Gallery of South Australia (2023), Seventh Gallery (Melbourne) 2023, Live Dreams (Performance Space, Carriageworks) 2022, Adelaide Festival Centre 2022, South Australian Living Artist Festival (2019-22), The Venice International Performance Art Week: Dissenting Bodies Marking Time (2020), Sofia Art Week (Bulgaria, 2020), SALA (Adelaide, 2020), Æther (Bulgaria 2019), Collective Haunt Gallery Adelaide 2019, ACU Gallery Melbourne 2019, Head On Screens - Head On Photo Festival, Sydney 2019, Soft Power Palace at Kunstgebäude Stuttgart 2018.