“Deworlding”
Michelle Sakaris
29 May → 4 July 2015
Where most ordinarily human communal practices, habits and behaviours work toward putting us into the 'world', a withdrawal from the world that may be the result of intention or accident suggests a de-worlding. De-worlding amounts to a disorienting of our fit in the world to which we belong.
On the 1-year anniversary of the Copiapó mining accident in Chile, Michelle Sakaris undertook a performance in which she deprived herself of sunlight for 70 days. She confined herself to her home during daylight hours with all windows and openings covered by sheets of felt and corrugated cardboard. From amongst all the variety of deprivations experienced by the trapped Chilean miners, she took this one element of sunlight deprivation as the basis of a vow.
The performance effectively dissolves the very notion of a single day extending it to an experience of 1,692 consecutive hours from sunset on the 4th of August to the sunrise on the 14th of October. The exhibition Deworlding presents the documentation of this durational performance
Michelle Sakaris is a Melbourne-based artist, whose performance art practice extends into installation and video. Her work reflects on and is motivated by the power of rituals found in the historical and myth making narratives of religious and secular institutions. Of interest to her is the power of ritual centred on specific dates, events and sites and how they take on heightened and unusual significance. Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2009 she has presented numerous solo exhibitions and commissions and has won the Blake Prize John Coburn Emerging Artist Award.