Georgia Sagri – Mona Lisa Effect

at Kunsthalle Basel (13/4 - 08/6/14)

The “Mona Lisa effect” is a term describing an optical and psychological effect produced by the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, now in the collection of the Louvre. Testifying to Leonardo’s mastery, the smiling Mona Lisa seems to follow us with her gaze as we move about the gallery – if we can move at all. For the painting itself, protected by bulletproof glass, two barriers and museum attendants, seems to have the power to transfix visitors in whatever spot they manage to find among the crowd, where their movements are limited to raising their arms and taking pictures.

Under the title “Mona Lisa Effect”, Georgia Sagri’s exhibition addresses the physical and political phenomenon of movement both inside and outside the gallery space, through a series of performative, rhetorical and technological devices that organize the exhibition space. This “movement” can further be understood as our natural human disposition (and right) to move, to gather and disperse, to convene and reconvene. In Sagri’s reading of the Mona Lisa effect, the gaze emanating from the masterpiece thus becomes a metaphor of the ever-surveying, ever-inspecting gaze of authority – the diffused political power that permeates human lives in contemporary society. This “soft” omnipresence of power has long since become an integral dimension of our lives as citizens: being a citizen today equals being subject to biopolitics, the form of power that impacts all aspects of human life, as the private and public sphere meld into an inseparable whole.

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