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Sārāh is a research informed artist & healer [rejuvenation activist]*, working in re-member-ship of kinship practice, which includes reflections into decolonial templates and emerging intrapsychic environments, through artistic, process led coemergence, expressed in ceremony, sound, sensation, image and multimedia live arts.
artist, activator*
[ ”activator”, in place of the word: “healer”, as at the core, all healing is self-healing, allowing oneself to bloom from within. We heal ourselves in the presence of safe space holders and being mirrored in our wholeness. ]
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As descendant of both migrating Sri Lankan diaspora and British/Irish settling colonies, Sārāh came into being on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of Woiwurrung language group, in Kulin Nation; who are The Traditional Custodians of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her Lineages weave through South & West Asia, North & West Europe, outwards/inwards, reconciling in rivers of reparation, remembrance/forgetting. She is based in Berlin.
Sārāh’s position of a de-conditioning gaze is expressed in a (re)claiming BIPoC, sometimes-white-passing-sometimes-not, cis-AFAB-female body. She sees identity as both an expression of soul and relational world - in interplay between fixed and mutuable pathway. Her chosen pronouns: she, they, or no-pronoun.
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CONCEPTS..
Sārāh works analytically and technically with subtle body energies, psychic-ecologies and their complex interconnected relationship within environment. The core focus of her practice operates on cyclic actions of decentralised witness and multiplicity: an ‘I’ in search of the ‘we’. She favours Water Wisdoms for their holding capacities, and tenderness, Yin.
Her focus into rejuvenation holds a relationship with holistic rhythms of the un-manifested, exploring identity, embodiment, psyche, intuition, as dynamic energy passing through individual and collective.
Through dreamwork, animist earth-as-medicine-based practices & ritual, inner embodied alchemy [somatics] and orphic incantation [sound healing: authentic voicework, polyrhythm, echo] articulated by research into non-linear consciousness theory, and narrative [poetics, archetype, myth and the absurd] - Sarah’s work opens communication to mediate modern machine and transpersonal Spirit.
Inner-experience is product, holding concurrent metaphysical spaces and paradox in acknowledgement of the non-dual. We work to become a clean mouth piece for prophecies and oracles of The Unseen.
Depth is understood within Darkness, as vital incubation and initiation, intuition-technology, authenticity, chance, synchronicity; influenced by aktionist, neo-concretism, radical transformability and abject art.
This approach to Energy & Ritual Practition, aims towards accumulating a cultual competent exchange - finding ways of respect to Indigenous sources of wisdom, is focused on collection, open source reference (sharing on), recognition, with ultimately working towards reparation of intuitional ways of being, as building blocks for future-present knowledge and more ethical working systems.
Under the terms ‘Ancestral Earth Medicine’ and ‘Re-Orbit Praxis’ (Decolonialist Shadow Work) her understanding of ‘decoloniality’ honours the transcendent (additions/expansions), over the purely integrative (comparative to a non-moving centre).
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A PRAXIS..
Sārāh offers One on One sessions in the capacity of an Intrasectional & Diasporic Ancestral Belonging, Exploratory Core-Shamanic Practitioner, with Ritual and Witness counsel for Power rebalance.
The one on one session work focused on Shadow re-routing, in the support of self-mercy.
We do this through holding emotion, adjusting gaze to hold space that is greater than the personal, and reclaiming in a way that is self-aware to greater dynamics of the collective.
Sārāh’s ability to vison & feel into complex systems is due to having struggled with positionality and her own lineage-narrarives. Through staying present with inner dialogues of suffering - holding the tensions - a wound transforms into a nutrient space.
Through sensing and presence this praxis can provide consistent companionship - also through conflict or disagreements - for ritual and deeper access to Soul, as we go through periods of major transition or loss.
Sound, Movement, and Natural Elements are companions in this work.
More info on sessions is listed on the PRAXIS PAGE page or flow over to the BLOG to discover more.
More info on ETHICAL TERMS & CONDITIONS are here.
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ABOUT RESEARCH CEREMONIES...
Online or in-person research ceremonies [as workshop or ceremony] are made for studio groups or research teams interested in ritual, the relation of the body, processual art.
Sarah has interest in supporting artists in developing new future-focused authentic ceremonial research practices.
Sārāh grows an ongoing container : INTRA RHYTHMS online community space on discord, which you are welcome to access as a new client in the praxis.
Starting in 2024 she also shares a Gardening Project as ‘Space of Psychic Belonging’ with clients & community.
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ETHICS..
In choosing to refocus kinship practices, as a non-indigenous body, a most important aspect and in constant development are ethics. Sārāh is always learning, practicing with wisdom shared with consent and referencing where things come from, yet, she is also fallible and will always be in process of de-conditioning. The systemic issues we live within will take longer than her lifetime to unwind and she too is a part of the issue, privilege being always what we don't 'have' to know about.
She opened into publicly accessible session work format, after 7+ years of continued personal inner work through a Jungian lens, out of necessity for expansion into a relational & praxis-based wisdom, emergent for both personal & collective liberations.
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RESEARCH...
Sarah is currently researching Kinship Systems; Gaze, Psychic Boundaries, Circle Culture, Water, Indigenous Cosmologies, Mapping through Story/Song, Roots; Personal and Essential Identity, Abstraction & Trance Poetry, Karma & The Yugas (Planetary Ages), Non-Duality.
Her formula for research is a non linear model, where Spirits and Realm are recognised and invited into the body of the process through session work and open ceremony. The one on one sessiion works offer a profoundly deep and private form of consentual research where client’s spirit-worlds and ancestral maps also inform and guide Sarah’s worldview, map of healing, and ethics. She is currently interested in more participatory spaces of cultural abundances to offer research ceremony and resonate with greater root system networks.
The most recent development of research ceremony is expressed through Roots To Freedom Ancestral Belonging ceremonies (2024).
Her research into digitalisation as portal, through online dream exchange (2015), residency & writing focus (2019-2021), research ceremony (2022) and continued live electronic sound sessions (2023-2024) holds the digital as a realm, a leverage for expanding into multi-perspectivism, evolving into intra-sectionality: psychic fragments as unique blueprint for an expansive (trauma healing) grid.
This expanded into ‘Shadow Alchemy through Saya Soma: Shadow Body In Encoded System (2020-22)’, pending publication, post Body In Algorithms Residency 2023, Zero Corners - and was previously presented through sound, visuals and writing, with the Foundation of Shamanic Studies Europe (2019-2022) and as performance happening with CTM Festival Hacklab Berlin (2018).
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PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS,,,
Sārāh's work with performance, video, sound and image has been supported through recent colaborations appearing as; installation in Kreuzberg Pavillion (Berlin, 2024), KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin (Berlin, 2022) with Benjamin Busch, on tour with Sunni Leilani with Jazz Equinox (Corsica, 2024), developmental residencies; Sternhagen Gut, supported by Music Board Berlin (2021), Body in Algorithms (2021), curated by Ashley Middleton and Georgia Perkins, and she’s exhibited internationally in institutions such as Screenspace (Melbourne, Australia) curated by Laura Castagnini, festivals such as At.tention festival (Lärz, Germany), Atrium Space (Melbourne, Australia) and fortyfivedownstairs (Melbourne) together with live art collaboration Spill Collective (2008 - 2011).
She has performed live electronic sound in open air, radio format, listening bar & club setting, Kosmos Festival (2024), Kwia (Berlin), OHM (Berlin), and has brought multimedia performance art (AV) into spaces such as about:blank (Slut Walk, Berlin, 2012) curated by Sylvia Sadzinski, embracing accessibility of live arts within Berlin’s underground club music scene.
Sārāh held a relational vessel, Consumer Refund, online and through sound performance. Between 2014 - 2022 individuals could integrate their subconscious matter (dreams) into her C-Refund archive via private experience, where the internet allows the fostering of a intimately personal, yet anonymous connection. She released electronic music under the name C-Refund on Patterns of Perception, (2022, Berlin).
Between 2016-2017, Sārāh founded and curated an independent art and music space: Aether (Berlin, Nuekölln), focusing on post-internet, conceptual art, ambient sound and noise.
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EXTERNAL PROJECTS / CONSULTANCY ...
Sārāh is an active member and representative of feminist electronic music / digital arts network female:pressure, with a focus into inclusive mediation infrastructure, having received the KeyChange Eu Inspiration Award 2024, Tallinn Music Week, Estonia.
Since 2022 she offers grant application copy-writing services as volunteer, for individuals applying for indigenous fellowship grants. (Spread by word of mouth only - Please get in contact!)
She consults within the infastructure of Electronic Music on deal Contracting and Invoicing currently with WeAreE Agency.
Through years 2015 - 2019 Sārāh worked in faciliation and communications for digital art and computer music studio; Studio Robert Henke and in 2019 - 2020 moved into Research and Communications with Studio Tomás Saraceno. Through socio-cultural practice in multi-media arts, installation, sound, club-culture, co-creational artistic praxis and attunement to more-than-human-ecology.
Threads of a degree in Exploratory Fashion Design (1.Hons, 2008) from R.M.I.T. Melbourne drew her towards a collaborative program in transformative sustainability, in connection with S.I.A.L [spatial information architecture laboratory]; where the work and mentorship of Prof. Pia Ednie Brown, Research Supervisor Prof. Robyn Healy, artists Adele Varcoe, Boo Chapple and designers Material By Product [Susan Dimasci, Chantal Kirby] inspired reflection upon radical theories of toxicity, the networked connection of the human body with layers of environment, which were seeds into working with Objective Psyche.
In 2015 she turned towards the meta-physical and began studies with the Foundation of Shamanic Studies Europe, honouring alternative formats of inner research and intimate ceremony, learning Tarot, Astrology, Akashic Records, and many other Oracular intuitional systems.
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RE CLAIMING - HERITAGE & ANCESTRY
Special interest into the energy of Inanna (Ancient Sumeria), Quan Yin (Roots to Ancient India), and the Wu (Ancient China), who were the first Shamanic Daoists, practicing energetic transmutation through dance. [Among many other practices]
After 10+ years, She is at the tip of the iceberg in discovering the richness of these practices and how different aspects of Buddhism and Mythology interact and flow through her own. She is working in order to claim ALL of her ancestry - which really means belonging to the Earth and Cosmos. *
Through Sri Lanka her ancestry is Sinhalese [ Hela / South Asian / Malaysian / Indo-Aryan / Dutch / Indo-Portuguese / or Malay, from Java, Surat and Bengal ] *. Her Grandpa was born in Singapore & chosing Buddhism as a container for his Spirtuality. The ancient shamanic ethos of the Veddas, was connected somewhat to Buddhist practice [original and ancient forms of Sinhalese Buddhism - very different from modern day interpretations, which now are affected by colonial power-over & caste systems]. These practices remain a part of the discovery of her lost lineages. Sarah’s last name is assumably of Dutch origin. ‘Martinus’ carrying some meaning around ‘Warrior of Mars’.
Sārāh is learning to write her name in Sinhalese: සාරා එලිසබෙත් මාටිනස්
In Australia, Sārāh grew up on the unceeded lands of the Wurundjeri tribes in Melbourne/Naarm, with ancestry to England/Ireland & Entire Europe - as both an immigrant and desendant of settler colonies. She inherited here Christian Lineages and was raised with Christian Spirituality. ‘Sarah’ in Hebrew carries some meaning around ‘Princess’.
Learning stories of the Aboriginal Dreamtimes as Dream Animals shaped the Earth as a child was her favourite - she sought to belong to something deeper, and these stories made the most sense. She feels an overflowing amount of respect for Sacred Aboriginal Indigenous Wisdom especially Water Wisdom and Art Making.
Sārāh continues to study into personal cosmology, warmly defending independent, receptive, curiously interrogative, respectful and subversive creation.
* A reference to Luisah Teich. To “claim all of one’s ancestry” is to be responsible for the experiences of these ancestors. Responsibility also means: accountability, care of.
* Based on research found through Nira Wickramasinghe, a historian of modern Sri Lanka and professor of Modern South Asian Studies.
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Portrait Image with thanks to dear friend Mathilda Bernmark.