Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal

The ancient Greeks were zealous in their pursuit of healthy bodies and athletics, staging the first Olympic Games in the eighth century BCE as part of a religious festival in honour of Zeus, the king of the gods. Traditionally, young athletes competed naked, enabling artists to study the human form in action. Numerous black- and red-figure vases are decorated with scenes of competitions and athletic victories, trainers and athletes. For Sangeeta Sandrasegar, the goals of the athlete and the artist are linked. Both are found at the metaphorical boundaries of society, and each seeks a 'divine' aspect within the fullest possible human experience. Like the Greek god Dionysus, who existed on the borderline between the human and the divine, the athlete and the artist harness a restless to and fro movement at the very edges of human achievement. Dionysus, or Bacchus as he was known to the Romans, was the child of Zeus and a mortal mother. Dionysus's duality, his capacity to represent one thing and its opposite simultaneously, and his status as 'outsider'god, provide the philosophical framework for Sandrasegar's new videos and paper cut-out work. Her first video "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal" (2012) takes its title from Keats's Ode to a Grecian urn. It features Sandrasegar, clothed anonymously in black, as a lone figure running through an Australian bush landscape, perhaps being chased or in search of escape. The silhouetted figure and pink-hued mise-en-scene echo the design of archaic black-figure vases, which often featured Dionysian iconography. Sandrasegar's second, related, video is titled Enthusiasm (2012) a word that comes from the Greek, meaning literally 'possessed by God'. It was filmed early this year from the vantage point of an unseen runner looking backwards on a path in the lush Keralan countryside in South India. The video is saturated with colour and light, which has the effect of focusing our attention on the sky and the narrow, sun-dappled path.