Invited to participate in an exhibition titled What People Do for Money and in accordance with a long tradition of institutional critique, Sagri invited a “real worker,” the Swiss bankerJosephin Varnholt, to produce her sculpture Documentary of Behavioural Currencies (2016) with the intention of
defying the hierarchy between the “model” and the “genius master.” Functioning like a modernized version of portrait painting, the sitter became the artist’s partner in a conversation where they used private sign language. This private body language is the supportive device of the parrhesiastic  disclosure: Sagri exposes the Western—and in fact both populist and elitist—institutional framework of the art system’s “exhibitionary complex.” This
term refers to Tony Bennett’s concept where he discusses the institutions of confinement,such as prisons (which are Foucault’s focus), behaving analogously to institutions of exhibition, such as museums. To live in a post-disciplinary society means exercising power/ knowledge through automated protocols of professional conduct, which replicate biased distinctions while securing and legitimizing the institutional power of the market.

While exposing institutional power, and at the same time insinuating the pivotal role of private investment in the art world, Sagri exposes the ways in which global markets continue to lower wages while accumulating capital for very few others, an injustice profoundly documented in Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Sagri’s work tells us that class divisions are in fact maintained from within a system that purportedly opposes them.

Sotirios Bahtsetzis