INVOCATIONS OF FLESH
A series of hand-painted photographs by Amélie Ravalec.
Winner of the IPFA Award 2025
(International Photography Festivals Association)
Selected as one of 20 artists out of 1500 submissions through the IPFA Award to present a solo exhibition internationally in 2026/2027.
Embodying the opposing forces at the heart of Ankoku Butoh, Invocations of Flesh is an exploration of the male body as ritual invocation, a study of darkness and light, erasure and presence, the subconscious made physical.
Ichihara Akihito, principal dancer from Sankai Juku, one of the world's foremost Butoh companies,
brings a spectral, dissolving presence, ethereal, barely tethered to the earth, as if called from above.
Paul Michael Henry, Butoh dancer and performer who trained under Butoh masters Yoshito Ohno and Yukio Waguri,
is a force of gravity and conflict, pulled downward, raw and visceral, stirred by something primal.
Each work captures a fragment of performance pulsing through layers of paint, colour and abrasion. Vivid strokes of red, deep blue and sulphur yellow bleed across the body like bruises or hallucinations, as if the skin itself were breaking into light.
The photographs are hand-painted, reworked until flesh becomes pigment and shadow becomes skin. The frame is no longer a boundary but a site of rupture, scratched, stained, obscured. What remains is not a fixed image but a living surface, flickering with movement, raw and feverish, always on the verge of dissolving. A series of becomings: collapse, possession, invocation.
Labyrinth of the Unseen World, the performance work born from the same obsessions, weaves live Butoh dance, film, poetry and original score. Created with Paul Michael Henry and supported by Creative Scotland and Butohpolis, one of Europe's most prestigious Butoh institutions, it exists as the shadow twin of this series, the body in motion where here the body is stilled. Screener available on request.
© Amélie Ravalec, 2025–2026