A scene from the Thai ballet of necromancy 2, from the series The mobility of happiness

Sara Oscar is a Sydney based photographer whose nuanced work focusses on the imperceptible and interstitial. In the series The Mobility of Happiness Oscar is in part photographically exploring her own Burmese Thai cultural heritage in addition to the Western pursuit of ‘wellness’ and its corresponding commodification. Spiritual guidance is sought by the ‘ghost dancers’ through the recollection of narratives involving nats (spirits). Oscar has superimposed semi-transparent shapes onto these black and white photographs. The colours are culturally significant and extend Oscar’s attempt to photographically cultivate spiritual and metaphysical ambience.

More broadly, this series examines the pursuit of happiness and how such a pursuit may take visual form becoming symbolically charged through the incorporation of certain symbols. Her earlier photographic series also examined this charge. The research of Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer (1880-1926) whose enquiry into inheritable traits focused on conicidence rather than shared traits is also an influence in the artist's pursuit of a beautiful symmetry in the randomness of shared experience.