2016 – 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

Against Nature

at National Gallery in Prague – Trade Fair Palace, Prague (16/12/16)

For Part II of her Live Portfolio (Part I was presented at Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2011) Georgia Sagri makes a live mix-tape of two performance pieces. The first piece, Performance, was presented in Berlin at Lars Friedrich gallery in 2012 and the second, Thank you Rodin, is a new piece created especially for the August Rodin section in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in Prague. Both pieces will implicate other works by Sagri from 2011 until the present. “It is the making of the portfolio, its format, its banality of duration by adding the real and the live, like the leaking juices of fresh fruits, sticky fingers, too much nature, smelly and weird. The sounds of pain/ the cracking of fear/ the whispers of pause/ the abominable posture/ hand/ arm/ neck. The expression of the remembering of an incident but not the incident itself. Is that possible? Squeezed among some languages you know, you pretend you know, you want to know. Scratch it, suck mediations, which that could be a type of mimesis. Doing from directions coming from elsewhere. Rather unexpected than improvised. There is no 'as if'. It is the design of the portfolio. Making portfolio and forgetting it. This was only a draft, some other things will come up and you will be noticed. The power point presentation will be totally and extremely burst with lying. ‘I wasn't expecting something different.’ Of course nothing will be placed in the correct chronological order. Are you accusing me of narcissism Apple? ‘I love my i-phone.’ The i-pad portfolio and the fingernails' pad pads on the keyboard. Work in the mid of the summer and wonder what social class is. Hot is slow. Touch, skin and the right jeans. As always at the corner with the smoke in the mouth. An electric cigarette. The taste of look. How she moves her eyes when she is trying to be convincing, and how she stretches her neck every time every time she.” (Georgia Sagri, New York, 2011)

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Live Portfolio (2011-now), photo by Johana Posova. ©Georgia Sagri

Antigone Now

at Onassis Cultural Center, New York (15/10/16)

Georgia Sagri‘s seven-minute Antigone Model - Coda is performed in a loop for half an hour. Every repetition presents a different interpretation. Each minute of the variation represents one figure of the Antigone tragedy.

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Antigone Model-Coda. ©Georgia Sagri

34 Exercises of Freedom, documenta 14: Public Program

at Athens and Kassel (17,18/9/16)

P. B. PRECIADO: Speaking with many of the artists working with us for the exhibition, and also with many different local groups and movements and associations and international artist people as well, I wanted them to come and exercise freedom with us in a place that is marked by a history of dictartorship and oppression. I didn’t want any kind of hierarchy among the participants. And I didn’t want to have keynote speakers like sociologists and historians, and then an artist, and maybe at night a party. Rather, everything was an unconventional mix. And you said, “I want to do a twenty-four-hour performance.”
GEORGIA: And you replied, “How are we going to do that?” The twenty-four-hour performance piece titled Attempt.Come. wasn’t only an exercise in regard to premise of endurance but a way to acquire experience for the piece that I will present during documenta 14 in June. Askisi is the Greek word for “exercise,” but implies something beyond. How to acquire intelligence through honing. I’m saying to some of the students and participants in the piece I’m going to do: imagine that there is a war, with thought on one side and action on the other. One side thinks it is more important to think than to act. The other side thinks you need to act first and then think. So we are kind of like little sensitive animals, in the center of the war, and because we exercise, because we are in the process of askisi, we are able to manipulate this process of the fight in a context a-day-by day practicing, where we open up space for those who don’t want to participate in the either/or. This is for me freedom. You need to acquire intelligence of not going to the totalities, the extremes. Not to the extreme of thought nor to the extreme of action—so this is Askisi, the day-to-day practice.

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Attempt. Come, photo by Stathis Mamalakis. ©Georgia Sagri

Manifesta 11 – What People Do for Money

at Zurich, Switzerland (11/6–18/9/16)

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 banker Josephin 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.

Manifesta 11, The European Biennal of Contemporary Art, was curated by Christian Jankowsky

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Documentary of Behavioural Currencies, photo by Flavio Karrer. © Georgia Sagri

Documentary of Behavioural Currencies | Georgia Sagri as Georgia Sagri (still without being paid as an actress)

at UPSTATE, Zurich (11/6–18/9/16)

In the parameters of her participation in M11 artist Georgia Sagri, treated the curatorial and organizational frame of Manifesta as a terrain of negotiations, regarding what the artists is "supposed to do", and what is "assumed to be doing". The artist situated an economy for her work equal to the rest of the participating artists as well as she negotiated and succeeded to split the filming crew which was imposed by the M11 to film her and her working process in two parts. The first part was not to allow filming for the publicity of the organization, but to use the crew only for the two days to film her video piece. While for the second part, the artist used the crew to film herself, negotiating with two of the employees of M11. By this tactic she turned the a priori "role" of the artist that the organization imposes, into an open query on her process being not only focused in matters of display and representation but also authorship and censorship. The work was ultimately censored by M11 and the artist decided to present it together with three other works (related to the whole) as a solo exhibition at the Upstate an artists' run space in Zurich. The solo exhibition was under the same title as all of her work in M11, Documentary of Behavioral Currencies.

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Documentary of Behavioural Currencies; Georgia Sagri as Georgia Sagri (still without being paid as an actress), photo by Marc Asekhame. ©Georgia Sagri

Bread and Roses – Artists and the Class Divide

at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (19/2-1/05/16)

As part of the exhibition “Bread and Roses” Georgia Sagri presents 'Commas', two pieces that share the same title. Each of the pieces activates two sites that are part of the temporary site of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw: the glass Emilia pavilion, and the block of flats at Pańska 3 street. For the Emilia the artist displays a text cut in vinyl that brings to light a forgotten origin of the written language in order to point out the social responsibility that the writer and distributor of thought has today as a new political praxis. The concept of the text is mirrored as an action through a sequence of banners on the opposite residential block. The banners representing a few commas and full stops displayed by the residents who willingly act in place of words and form a semantic pattern. The action continues until the end of the exhibition. With these two works Sagri brings forward the unusual connection between the meaning of the word “comma” (the punctuation mark) and its other surprising meaning in Greek, which stands for political party. The exhibition was curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Natalia Sielewicz.

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The Eccentrics

at Sculpture Center, New York (24/1- 4/4/16)

Georgia Sagri, for her new performance piece becomes a sort of news tamer in Sunday Stroll Undone and Redone (2016), calling for empathy as she reorders and reanimates news items and images within the elaborate installation that shares the same title. Sagri's work suggests a process of activating history, the past and the future as an ongoing playful present.

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