Welcome to a presentation of the artist Georgia Sagri. Georgia Sagri’s talk is organized in the framework of Holes Spirals Waves, a programme that questions forms of chrononormativity and challenge culturally, socially and politically constructed concepts of time.
Georgia Sagri presents her practice in a public talk with a focus on her research practice IASI (in Greek ίαση, recovery) Stage of Recovery that was developed, in overlapping phases, for more than a decade. In 2019, she presented her work in three art institutions: Mimosa House (London, UK) curated by Daria Khan; TAVROS (Athens, GR) curated by Maria-Thalia Carras and Olga Chatzidaki; and De Appel (Amsterdam, NL) curated by Monika Szewczyk. Each institution supported Sagri’s research and opened an in-depth conversation on her practice by hosting numerous IASI sessions (2019-2021) and conducting solo exhibitions of her work. Sagri works with individual participants via confidential and anonymous one-to-one sessions as part of her body of research practice into self-care and recovery – based on her own performance preparatory and recovery techniques that use breath as an active agent, movement, and voice.
The artist’s ongoing research was also the basis for her iconic work Dynamis, which was featured at documenta 14 (Kassel and Athens, 2017) and involved sharing these techniques with more than 200 members of the public across the two cities. During this process, Sagri observed an improvement in the general well-being of the participants which prompted her to continue her investigation. Currently, she shares and develops her practice and techniques with members of the public at her studio and art space ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE.
The talk is preceded by a three-days workshop dedicated to a group of practitioners that investigated, through physical responses and conversations, notions of care, self-recovery, pain, fatigue, exhaustion and anxiety.
Georgia Sagri is an artist, scholar, and tenured professor of Performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts. She is the founder of the non-profit artists’ run space ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE in Athens. Her interdisciplinary practice comprises a variety of media: sculpture, video, drawing, installation, and writing centered on the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life. Much of her work is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles regarding issues of autonomy, empowerment, and self-organization. Her first monograph catalog was published by Sternberg Press in 2018, following her solo exhibitions Georgia Sagri Georgia Sagri at Kunstverein Braunschweig, and Georgia Sagri and I at Portikus, Frankfurt. She is the author of the book Stage of Recovery, Divided Publishing, 2021.