Georgia Sagri © Eva Tsakni
Georgia Sagri
Georgia Sagri was born in Athens, Greece. She lives and works between Athens and New York. At the center of Sagri’s practice lies the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life, interconnected, though distinct from the dialectics of representation in theatre, music and dance. Her pieces are exhibitions, where material and immaterial elements coexist to create complete worlds. Object based and live-based components of the work relate, and the challenge is to present the building tensions, mental as well as physical. Her practice is undisciplined: A great part of her artistic output comprises video and computer work, writing, installation, design, web programming, drawing, music composition and painting, and a great portion of it is influenced by her on-going engagement in social and political movements on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organization. Her performance installations comprise elaborate elements and extensive “procedures”: preparatory drawings and videos, text and printed media, movement, voice and sound, pre-recorded and live-edited, and installation in multimedia. The performance then evolves and continues, into a new set of works, drawing on the critical, social, and intellectual exchanges surrounding its time-based presentation, to challenge the pre-established notions of performance and its documentation. She often invites artists and thinkers with their work to join her process, as she is interested to open up and complicate the commonly understood formats of exhibition making and that of the field of art-objectness and its singularity.
Her first institutional solo show, curated by Adam Szymczyk, was presented at Kunsthalle Basel under the title “Mona Lisa Effect”, in the spring of 2014. She was included in the Biennale de Lyon (2013), ProBio, Expo 1: New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2013) and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Her work has been shown internationally in public institutions, including Fordé (Geneva), The Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), KW Berlin, Arnolfini (Bristol), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), Deste Foundation (Athens) and in private galleries including Anthony Reynolds (London), MelasPapadopoulos (Athens), Lars Friedrich (Berlin), Team(New York), Murray Guy (New York), Real Fine Arts(New York), Andrew Roth (New York), Circus (Berlin), Terri and Donna (Miami) and Central Fine (Miami). She is the founder of the audio-only magazine FORTÉ (www.magazineforte.com) and SALOON, an on-going curatorial project. Her recent work Daily Bread (dailybread.nyc) was an online and physical exhibition supported by Issue Project Room and hosted by Mathew_nyc in New York. She is a participant artist in the 14th Istanbul Biennial 2015 curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.