Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in collaboration with de Appel, Amsterdam, in the framework of the exhibition Ulay Was Here, present “Here is Ulay with”. At Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, de Appel transforms Room 1.15 into a place where Ulay’s presence is thought and felt beyond his death. Georgia Sagri presents two works stemming from her evolving research practice, IASI (recovery in Greek). As her practice evolved inside de Appel’s Aula from one-on-one strengthening sessions towards her major solo exhibition, Sagri helped recover memories of Ulay from de Appel’s Archive. She chose to respond to Ulay’s remarkable changeability by activating her profound exploration of the breathing body. The name “Windface’’ used in the drawing and the video installed in room 1.15 of the Stedelijk Museum calls up Ulay at his most vital.

Sagri’s drawing extends the ongoing IASI series. These function as memory traces of her work with participants in one-on-one sessions, as “sensorial references” and as scores for the continuing treatments. In Windface, 2020, Sagri connects to her own body during a performance which inaugurated her exhibition at sunset (18:25 CET) on 24 October 2020. This trace may be also understood as a score for a second performance planned at sunrise on 30 November 2020, Ulay’s birthday. In her video, Georgia Sagri incorporates different recordings made by witnesses of her sunset performance. The particular quality of the video material and how it has been edited bring focus to the artist, not as identifiable image, but as a body and a voice in preparation, in recovery. The name Breathing (7_1_7) encodes the balance between the breath in (7) and the breath out (7). In between there is a hold (1), a threshold.

Similarly to the balance between inhale and exhale, the sunset performance is balanced by one at sunrise. November 30, 2020, the first birthday of Ulay since his death on March 2, 2020, coincides with a lunar eclipse. Marking the fleeting and mystical moments of sunset and sunrise, the ending and beginning of night and day, Sagri marks out a space and time where the living and the departed may momentarily connect