2025 – georgia sagri

GIBCA #13 a hand that is all our hands combined

at Gothenburg , Sweden (20/09 - 30/10/25)

Georgia Sagri participates in the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art #13, curated by Christina Lehnert. GIBCA is organized by Röda Sten Kunsthalle in collaboration with The Gothenburg Museum of Art, Göteborgs Kunsthalle, Gothenburg City Library and Skövde Art Museum.

Can we think beyond Us and Them?

The title, a hand that is all our hands combined, originates in a line from a poem by Solmaz Sharif, and stands as a reminder of the collective responsibility that we all share towards the present, past and future, on both individual and societal levels. The curator, Christina Lehnert, works here with artists who strive for artistic freedom, challenge the institutions who yield to political pressure, and have a practice characterized by acts of solidarity. A new sense of responsibility for the present emerges through active engagement in political events, social movements and alternative forms of expression.

Georgia Sagri contributes with two works, Gone, Gone Beyond a new sculpture and performance piece; and City, an installtion and perfor presented firstly in Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz.

Gone, Gone Beyond has developed around breath—its visibility, invisibility, and political weight. A pressure-device sculpture inhales and exhales like a living organism, while a performance engages with rupture, grief, and the ways identity can be reassembled when coherence falters. Inspired by the late work of one of Greece’s most important poets, Katerina-Aggelaki Rouk, Of the loneliness double-faced monologues, the piece asks how presence can be held when parts of the self vanish, and how one begins again, breathing toward connection. The performance premiered for the public on September 20th at Röda Sten Kunsthalle.

CITY was first presented in Sagri’s solo exhibition Case_O. Between Wars at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. For GIBCA, she brought a revisited version of the work, originally conceived as a duet with actor Jim Fletcher. Through pre-recorded voices, live singing, hymns, liturgies, and physical strain, CITY opens a space where language and gesture shift into communal practice. It is a fragile yet insistent attempt at being with one another: trembling, surrendering, resisting, and singing through rupture. The performance took place for the public on September 21rst at Skövde Art Museum.

↓

Georgia Sagri, Gone Gone, Beyond, 2025, Fabric, polyester, permanent blower, guy ropes, bag, 4.9m x 2.7m x 2.7m GIBCA #13, Röda Sten Kunsthalle, Gothenburg. Photo by: Ellika Henrikson ©Georgia Sagri

Georgia Sagri, Gone Gone, Beyond, 2025, sculpture and performance, 20 September 2025, GIBCA #13, Röda Sten Kunsthalle, Gothenburg. Photo by: Ellika Henrikson ©Georgia Sagri

Georgia Sagri, City (2024), 2025, HD video, 40 min., 10 posters, inkjet print on paper, Röda Sten Kunsthalle, Gothenburg. Photo by: Andrej Lamut ©Georgia Sagri

Georgia Sagri, City (2024), performance, 21 September 2025, 40 min., Röda Sten Kunsthalle, Gothenburg. Photo by: Andrej Lamut ©Georgia Sagri

Public Secrets

at The Breeder, Athens (21/06 - 30/08/25)

The Breeder presented the group exhibition Public Secrets, featuring works by Eleni Christodoulou, Alexandra Christou, Maria Hassabi, Maria Joannou, Athena Kalogirou, Iva Lulashi, Olma, Paulina Olowska and Georgia Sagri.

Curated by Milovan Farronato, the show explored the fragile thresholds between visibility and concealment, intimacy and exposure. As he explains:

What happens when we overturn our perception or step off the beaten path? To deviate from the expected, to “delirare,” as it were, means to move away from the familiar, from the “lira”—the Latin word for an arable field, a space carefully cultivated and controlled. This exhibition delved into the spaces where convention is upended, where the familiar is disrupted, and where secrets are revealed. What transpires when the private becomes public, when the untold stories emerge from the shadows and step into the light? Perhaps it is the metaphorical elephant entering the room—an unavoidable truth suddenly made visible.

Public Secrets took its inspiration from this complex interplay of visibility and concealment, of internal and external, of private and public. Through the works of invited artists, the exhibition explored the tension between what is concealed and what is exposed, urging us to confront those things we might prefer to overlook. It seeked to “put the other side of the coin on display,” showing not only what is seen but what is hidden in plain sight.

In one sense, Public Secrets asked us to consider those “obvious” truths that are rarely articulated—those uncomfortable realities that are nonetheless always present. In another sense, it pushed us further into the realm of the taboo, the unsaid, the hidden in plain view. How do these layers of meaning shift when the personal becomes a public spectacle? When the hidden is unveiled, how does our relationship with what was once secret change?

Georgia Sagri presented two sculptures from the Working the No Work (Travailler Je ne travaille pas) series, previously presented at the 76th Whitney Biennial.

Central to Sagri’s research is the exploration of performance art as an ever- evolving domain within both social and visual life. Much of her work draws influence from her active involvement in political movements, engaging with issues of autonomy and self-organization. Her cross- disciplinary practice delves into identity construction, social customs, and power structures, frequently subverting behavior patterns and reconsidering belief systems. The limits of physical endurance are critical to her work, as is the investigation of the bodily manifestation of politics. Regardless of the medium, Sagri’s work presents an intense and often humorous exploration of the human body, particularly its position within contemporary capitalist society.

↓

The Cynics Republic – Plac Defilad

at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (10/05/2025 - 08/06/2025)

Exhibition score by Pierre Bal-Blanc.

The Cynics Republic—Plac Defilad was an exhibition featuring dematerialized artworks (performances, protocols, films, sound pieces) from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Kontakt Collection in Vienna.

The Cynics Republic—Plac Defilad provided an alternative vision of the history of performance art. The exhibition offered a different historical framework for performative practices. Its starting point was the hypothesis that performance art—or at least the performative stance—has existed since antiquity and was especially influenced by one school of thought, namely Cynicism.

The ancient philosophy of Cynicism, with its most famous proponents Diogenes (c. 412–323 BC) and Hipparchia of Maroneia (c. 350–after 280 BC) maintained that people should live in harmony with nature, reject social categories in favor of imitating animals, shun material possessions, and strive for self-sufficiency (autarky). The philosophy was transmitted not so much through concepts as through gestures. It involved public attitudes, relating to others, words in action. This exhibition seeked to bring such philosophical ideas into dialogue with the notion of performance. All the works on show can be productively considered through the instructions left to us by the Cynics.

From May 19 to 25, 2025, Georgia Sagri’s SALOON: There Is No Country In Our Hearts (2014) was presented in the museum’s auditorium. The film gathers the full documentation of a four-part performance series presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013, incorporating texts in the form of subtitles, art works of the museum's collection and of the invited artists as well as diagrams that emerged during the film's editing process. The film is not just a documentation of a performance but a promotion of SALOON - a nomadic curatorial project started in 2009, engaging with themes of movement, flee, and deterritorialization. SALOON (2009-on going) is driven by a need for enjoyment and constant change, and by a questioning of what kinds of social grounds can be created when distinctions such as passive/active or inside/outside are suspended.

↓

Georgia Sagri, SALOON: There Is No Country In Our Hearts (2014), HD video, sound, 73'28", MSN Warsaw. ©Georgia Sagri

Kore

at The Breeder, Athens (08/05 - 07/06/25)

This exhibition gathers new works that continue the artist's exploration of recovery, optic fever, perception, and the body. Kore is a word with many layers—it is the freestanding female sculpture, it means “daughter” in Greek, and also refers to the pupil of the eye. All those meanings inform the exhibition. Each piece can be understood as a self-portrait—not in the traditional sense of representing a fixed identity, but as a portrait of conditions, of shifting states. The kore, as daughter and pupil, becomes a figure through which these states are mediated. Each work touches on the act of seeing and being seen, of being cared for or forgotten, protected or abandoned. If the show is a self-portrait, it is one that resists resolution. It insists on process, on attention, on remaining with.

By optic fever, Sagri refers to the condition of overstimulation and exhaustion caused by continuous visual consumption, primarily through screens. It describes the way technocapitalism accelerates perception, saturating the eye with restless images, collapsing depth and focus. In this fevered state, the act of seeing becomes disembodied, detached from attention, intimacy, or care.

Doubleness plays a central role in the show. Many works appear in pairs—interruptions, variations. Sagri is interested in how the eye moves between one and the other, how the act of seeing becomes unsettled and attentive. This doubling relates to several frameworks the artist has been thinking through: Freud’s “uncanny,” where the familiar becomes strange[1]; Dostoevsky’s The Double, in which the protagonist meets his identical counterpart and spirals into existential confusion[2]; and Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision as always doubled—the seen is always also seen[3].

But there are other figures in this show, too. The daughter, as a symbol of potential and change[4]. She holds space for something new while carrying traces of the past. In Kore, she also appears entangled in the mother’s protection, and in the lethargy of the absent father—not only as a figure missing, but as a presence defined by its absence. This absence can be an unsatisfied state, or an opening for a space of self-awareness, resistance, and the potentiality emerging within recovery.

In Greek mythology, the story of Demeter and Persephone echoes these themes. Persephone, abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld, becomes both the daughter who departs and the one who returns. Her cyclical movement between worlds represents transformation and renewal. Demeter’s grief and overprotection during Persephone’s absence turns the world barren, revealing the intensity of maternal attachment. Meanwhile, the figure of the father—Hades or Zeus—remains peripheral or emotionally withdrawn, shaping a mythic structure where the daughter’s identity forms in relation to maternal dominance and paternal distance. This myth illustrates how the daughter carries the weight of generational trauma and longing, while also creating space for rupture, independence, and emotional rebirth.

Each work invites a slowing down. A form of attention that is not about grasping, but about staying with. These pieces are not fixed images, but moving relations. They reflect Sagri's ongoing IASI (recovery) practice, developed over the past decade through one-to-one sessions across cities like London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Athens. That work—of listening, breathing, touching—continues to inform how she thinks about perception, presence, and healing.

Kore is a space for the eye to rest and reawaken. It asks for your time.

[1] Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, 1919.

[2] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Double, 1846.

[3] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, 1945.

[4] Jung, C.G. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959.

↓