2015 – georgia sagri

Business Meeting With Dry Ear

at Central Fine, Miami (1/12/15- 3/1/16, extended until 30/3/16)

“Business Meeting With Dry Ear. He needs to hear. Ask about Dry Ear and us, and how to proceed with his connection and make him become us.”

Georgia Sagro & Diego Singh

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Business Meeting With Dry Ear, photo by Christian Küster. ©Georgia Sagri

What is Them, 2015, Film, ©Georgia Sagri

Business Meeting With Dry Ear, photo by Christian Küster. ©Georgia Sagri

SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms -14th Istanbul Biennial

at Istanbul, Turkey (5/9 - 1/11/15)

There are collisions between art and life, knots that tie them together. Sometimes, simply the act of locating works of the symbolic order, such as artworks, in places where events have occurred that have entered into our imaginary systems through stories, history and myth, transforms them, and they assume a ritualistic and magical life. Their context triggers a short circuit that shakes our pacified categories and distinctions such as lack/presence, real/imaginary or present/past. Such shaking initiates their ability to operate, to have agency and transform the world. Acknowledging anthropologist Marilyn Strathern as her inspiration, Donna Haraway (whom I in turn acknowledge) wrote, ‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties.’ Some stories end storytelling, they foreclose the imagination, they bring no transformations, no worlds. So what stories can we tell each other in order for other stories to be told, like the branching of a tree? SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms hovers around a material – salt water – and the contrasting image-forms of knots and waves. (...) Theosophists such as Mme Blavatsky and Besant trained their ability to perceive the patterns and waves that permeate the universe (our heartbeat is a wave, our breathing is a wave, too). They reintroduced Yoga, and had faith in the broad ability of each and everyone of us to perceive the invisible realm; this was the age of Nikola Tesla’s experiments with radio transmissions (1893), Guglielmo Marconi’s patented invention of the radio (1896), and Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s discovery of the electromagnetic radiation waves we call X-rays (1895). There is a relation between these ideas and today’s attempts by some artists and cultural practitioners to understand hidden power structures and become emancipated from the invisible code of digital society (Ed Atkins). It is this form of new realism (not representational realism but a concrete appearance and emergence of the hidden manipulations of our lives by individuals and corporations) that inspires some of the artworks (Susan Philipsz, Irena Haiduk, Cevdet Erek, Georgia Sagri, Ania Soliman, Zeyno Pekünlü, as well as Lea Porsager’s hand-made copies of the gouaches in Besant and Leadbeater’s book) and essays (Alexander Provan, Beatriz Colomina) in SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms.

The Biennial was curated by Carolyn Christov Bakariev

How can religion, including that of cyberspace be liberated from protocols in an egalitarian way? People from all religions sang in unison, forming otherworldly sounds-music from the stars. There are parts of bodies on cloth : there are shadows of parts of bodies: there is a film of them singing. _Georgia Sagri, 2015

my first science fiction book, Religion; was created with the alliance of KW Institute of Contemporary art, Foreign Affairs Festival, in Berlin and Istanbul Biennial, 2015.

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my first science fiction book, Religion, photo by Stathis Mamalakis. ©Georgia Sagri

SALOON: There is no country in our hearts

at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (15/10/15)

The film “SALOON: There is no country in our hearts” records the artist’s series of four performances under the same title at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013. The performances took place within the context of the museum collection exhibition “In the heart of the country”, but were not part of the show. The film includes texts in the form of subtitles, art works from the Museum's collection and of the invited artists, activated during the different performances, as well as diagrams that emerged during the film's editing process. The film was developed under the condition of future uses and purposes without historicizing or framing a past event, that of a performance or of an exhibition. As such the film is not a documentation of a performance but a promotion of SALOON – a nomadic curatorial project the artist started in 2009 - and it announces its desire to continue to operate. SALOON (2009-ongoing) manifests Sagri's involvement in ideas of movement, flee, and deterritorialization. "SALOON derives just out of need for enjoyment and constant change. Assuming there is no passive and active, inside and outside, representation and representatives what kind of social grounds can be created?" - asks Sagri.

The film premiere, the screening and the conversation with the artist was curated by Monika Szczukowska.

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SALOON: There is no Country in Our Hearts (on Zofia Kulik and Anna Molska), 2014, Performance view, Duration:1h, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw photo by Bartosz Stawiarski. Sunday Stroll Undone, Performance, Krakow, Poland, ©Georgia Sagri

Foreign Affairs Festival

at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (4/7/15)

Together with 17 musicians based in Berlin from various religious backgrounds – Sufis, Jews, Christians, Muslims – artist Georgia Sagri composes a new musical and movement performance employing imitation and repetition of familiar beliefs’ movements on a path towards a future unified belief system. For Sagri, the performance is treated as a science fiction book in which monotheistic ceremonies become subjects of a “meta-religion”, which can perhaps only through their unification as gestures propose a new approach to faith and in extent to religion. This eight-hour piece, performed by the artist and her musical collaborators, visualizes the possibility of a non-individualistic approach to religion and defines the “materials” of faith by detaching them from their original significance, constantly deconstructing and exposing their micro-movements and transitions. On the project's website sfbreligion.com visitors could view the performance online and share their comments as it unfolded.

my first science fiction book, Religion; was created with the alliance of KW Institute of Contemporary art, Foreign Affairs Festival, in Berlin and Istanbul Biennial, 2015.

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my first science fiction book, Religion, photo by Stathis Mamalakis. ©Georgia Sagri

Exhibita.ch / EAT THE TOOL

at Fordé, Geneva, Switzerland and online at exhibita.ch (19/4 - 17/5/15)

There is an old story that gets told in North America about an Eskimo who has thirty-six different words for snow. It probably isn’t true. But I am more interested in what the story is about than whether or not it is true. What are people trying to communicate when they tell this story? What do we talk about when we talk about Eskimo snow argot? What are we saying about language and about how it relates to every day behaviors? The simple response would be, presumably, that Eskimos have a great deal more experience of snow than non-Eskimos do, and so they have developed a highly sensitive faculty of taste in the matter of snow; they can distinguish between different kinds of snow with a specificity that boggles our own less-experienced minds. Because we lack this language to describe winter precipitation, each of our experiences of snow are, pardon me, rolled up into one word: snow. Even as we understand that there is a big difference between a few, small, gently sifting flakes and driving streams of sleet and large casual floaters that vanish before the dawn.

We understand these differences, but when we try to remember them, we find that we don’t have the tools. Or we have to supplement endlessly the one tool we have; “It was snowing, and the snow was x, y & z.” This, rather than saying simply “It was x-ing;” where ‘x’ is one of these other, more specific terms for snow, the way that ‘broil’ is more specific than ‘cook.’ As a result, our vision of the past doesn’t account for a great deal of our experience and much of our life-with-snow goes unrecognized and unrecorded, which is almost the same thing.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve been losing my languages. I wake up and go down to the workshop and reach for my oldest words, my tools, and they are not there. The equipment with which I have hitherto constructed my habitat is vanishing, has vanished. It would be easy enough to leave the matter there: I’m losing my language! Sighs! Signs! Moody Possibility!

But that wouldn’t help me much, and moreover, it would risk making a metaphysics of language such that in mourning my language, I would also, in some sense, be mourning metaphysics. This was the sort of thing people did a lot when I was growing up: mourning metaphysics in the guise of investigating language. Very intense, very precious; often very remarkable. Sometimes I like to think my generation is more practical. We’ve had to be, I think, because it turns out there is such a thing as objective conditions after all. What words exist in Greek that don’t exist in English? Once I have those, I will make up words in English that correspond to the missing Greek words. Part of me feels that this trans-linguistic exchange might be the only way to defeat nationalism once and for all. Just, you know, get it over with and make whatever language we are living in as big and as beautiful as possible. Consolidate all the inventories, and give similar terms more specific meanings, until we can all remember everything forever and by its own name.

Stephen Squibb as Georgia Sagri

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Exhibita.ch/EAT THE TOOL, 2015, photo by Stathis Mamalakis. ©Georgia Sagri

GEORGIA SAGRI: DAILY BREAD

at Mathew Gallery, New York and online on dailybread.nyc, supported by Issue Project Room, New York (8 - 22/3/15)

On view Sunday, March 8th through Sunday, March 22, ISSUE Project Room presented Georgia Sagri’s Daily Bread, a streaming online exhibition and series of public and private performances conveying states of loss, mourning and offering. Commissioned as part of ISSUE’s Artist-In-Residence program, the exhibition reflects Sagri’s travels researching the social organization of Gamelan orchestras and artists' initiatives in Indonesia. For the purpose of the exhibition seven sculptures are made, cooked and prepared in manners resembling offertory traditions, each one facing a webcam, suggesting that they are there to transmit their elements. A website named Daily Bread allowed free and open access to the seven live streams. Georgia Sagri performed throughout the run of the installation, in both live readings and voice-over; sometimes public, sometimes private, with musical accompaniment by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. The exhibition had no opening. Daily Bread streamed 24/7 with online appearances by the artist broadcast in indicated streaming hours. Viewers were welcome to visit the exhibition during open public performances at Mathew NYC, 47 Canal Street, 2nd floor, NYC.

...In some places it is an offense to tip or bargain but when you enter a temple you leave behind all the coins you have in your pockets. If you had to tip or bargain perhaps you wouldn’t have coins in your pockets so you weren’t able to leave them in the temple. Is the one action connected to the other? Is this creating another idea about economy? Sometimes people if they don’t have coins they leave behind whatever they have in their hands; half eaten sandwiches, semi consumed beverages, paper foils and they light incense to give food to the winds. What kind of sentiment makes someone to even want to feed the winds? Is it a sentiment of acceptance for all those unknown elements, messages, particles, cells and dusts, that cannot be seen or prove their existence by been seen? Is the lighting of a candle the determination of something told? Is the light of a candle the visual proof of a message being heard? What are the similarities between the offer and the waste? What do we offer and what do we waste? Is the repression of temporalities that make visible an unknown that cannot been seen and cannot been named the state of a society that understands life only as constant naming, frame, control, knowing and beginning? How do we understand death? Do we struggle for representation or existence? How can we live without wanting to exist? How can we live without the feeling of being able to live? In some places it is more important to dress your dead relatives than those who are alive... — G.S 2014-15

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Sunday Stroll Undone

accompanied by Hunter Hunt Hendrix, curated by Monika Szczukowska, Junkier Sztuki and Nika Kowska, Krakow, Poland

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