May All Acts of Love and Pleasure Be My Rituals

Ophelia Bakowski

May All Acts Of Love And Pleasure Be My Rituals explores Nature as a conduit (channelling) 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 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, May All Acts Of Love And Pleasure Be My Rituals, 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.

Ophelia’s work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Daine Singer, Perth Centre for Photography, Blindside and Seventh Gallery. Their work is held in private collections across Melbourne, Sydney, Berlin, London, Paris and New York City, and in the public collection at the National Library of Australia. Ophelia has been a finalist in the Moran Contemporary Photography Prize and the CLIP Award. In 2019, they worked on solo shows at Kings Artist-Run, IamOphelia, and Alternating Current Art Space (Endure 2018) – discovering the nuances of queer self in practice.

Image: Ophelia Bukowski May All Acts Of Love And Pleasure Be My Rituals (still) 2019. Single channel HD colour video with sound. Courtesy of the artist.