2012 – georgia sagri

Working the No Work – A conversation between Georgia Sagri and Stephen Squibb

at Artists Space, New York (29/5/12)

For this event Georgia Sagri will be in conversation with writer Stephen Squibb, discussing her Biennial project and broader concerns around the relationship between performance, anarchy, political organizing and the (art) institution.

Artist Georgia Sagri’s contribution to Whitney Biennial 2012 comprises an evolving installation on the museum’s fifth floor mezzanine. As a site for a series of performances by Sagri over the course of the three-month exhibition, under the title Travailler Je ne travaille pas (working the no work), her regular presence is framed as a process of producing, editing and publishing a “live book.” Sagri’s performances revolve around a variety of repetitious compositions of sound and gesture – the central theme of these acts and the installation as a whole is the nature of work, and in particular the notion of “working the no work,” an effort to articulate and disturb structures of capitalist labor.

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Online announcement of the Working the No Work conversation, https://artistsspace.org

Whitney Biennial 2012

at Whitney Museum of American Art (1/4 - 27/5/12)

Sculpture, painting, installations, and photography—as well as dance, theater, music, and film—fill the galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the latest edition of the Whitney Biennial. With a roster of artists at all points in their careers the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded. The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10. The 2012 Biennial is in constant flux, with artists, works, and experiences varying over the course of the exhibition.

Georgia Sagri presents an ongoing installation/performance in which she engages a variety of media-distribution methods, such as film and video, audio recording, and print publishing. With the goal of producing of a book, Sagri will invite philosophers, activists and organizers, artists, and laborers to shape, through conversations and activities, the concept of “Working The No Work.” Reflecting especially on the radical shifts in political and social life of the present and recent past, the texts generated will feed back into the project as a whole, with Sagri playing the role of designer/editor/illustrator in unexpected ways.

PERFORMANCES Sundays: March 11–May 27 1 pm Fridays: March 9 and 16; April 27; May 18 7 pm

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Working the No work. ©Georgia Sagri

GEORGIA SAGRI – Gardens

at Andreas Melas & Helena Papadopoulos Gallery, Athens (19/1 - 8/3/12)

For her first exhibition with Andreas Melas & Helena Papadopoulos, Georgia Sagri constructs a flexible arrangement of Gardens where plants grow, plastic and ceramic objects appear, actions are traced and replicated by the artist in her performance that will take place at the gallery, on three consecutive evenings. A double no or a double yes, a strategy of reappropriation- homeopathic, synchronic, interminable. The Gardens, modular wooden boxes with aromatic plants, scattered sculptures and annexed benches, reference a site of enclosure, a stage where actor and viewer are subsumed under narrative structures already formed. Yet, Sagri, in an attempt to override the tragic fall of social and political fantasies offers French philosopher’s Alain Badiou’s event of love -“romance as the material and embodied practice of producing wonder”- as a possible space for the production of truth. Gardens includes an installation, a performance/loop, a PowerPoint presentation, a series of photographs and drawings and a collection of texts by the artist. Georgia Sagri also led a workshop on performance art, in collaboration with the Institute of Experimental Arts on January 22, 23 and 24 from 6-10pm, in the gallery offices on the 1st floor.

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