Ophelia Bakowski (VIC)

May All Acts Of Love And Pleasure Be My Rituals - FeltDARK nOV 2020

‘May All Acts Of Love And Pleasure Be My Rituals’ explores Nature as a conduit (channeling) for the facilitation of transcendent states. Invoking forms of magick, rituals of healing are performed for a queer body.

Through the mutation of time in their video practice, Ophelia Bakowski conjures into being states of reflection and meditation for the viewer. Performing rituals of elemental connection; the baptism of water and light heal the hardships and traumas of body and mind.

The title of the work becomes a mantra and spell to navigate in harmony with the currents and breezes of the soul. Informed from the symbolic motifs of the Tarot and religious iconography, a cyclical journey wraps around itself into a spiral of ritualised gesture, as performance and artist transmute into one.

For Ophelia, the fluidity and interconnectivity of Nature and identity allows for a reciprocal consciousness to share what is deeply personal and communal, sexual and platonic, identity and deidentification – In all, it is a rejection to the seduction of binaries.