The work of Greek visual artist and researcher Ioanna Sakellaraki investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction through playful interaction with, and manipulation of, the photographic object. Inspired by an image from her own father’s archive of a trip to the Greek island of Patmos, Sakellaraki found herself on the same island many years later for an extended period of lockdown. 

 

The Interval of Unreason weaves the discovery of stories of her father’s adventurous past with the historical significance of the island itself; Patmos was the location in which the biblical book of Revelation was penned by John in the 1st Century CE, who had been banished there by the Roman authorities for his Christian beliefs. Sakellaraki combines single photographs, diptychs, triptychs and blended images to haunting effect, as ghosts appear to inhabit many of the frames; the lines between the personal, cultural and historical archive are blurred, creating visually a contrast between the mundane mementoes of the everyday and the apocalyptic might of the cosmic.