Georgia Sagri
Ulay Was Here

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in collaboration with de Appel, Amsterdam, in the framework of the exhibition Ulay Was Here, present “Here is Ulay with”. At Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, de Appel transforms Room 1.15 into a place where Ulay’s presence is thought and felt beyond his death.

Georgia Sagri presents two works stemming from her evolving research practice, IASI (recovery in Greek). As her practice evolved inside de Appel’s Aula from one-on-one strengthening sessions towards her major solo exhibition, Sagri helped recover memories of Ulay from de Appel’s Archive. She chose to respond to Ulay’s remarkable changeability by activating her profound exploration of the breathing body. The name “Windface’’ used in the drawing and the video installed in room 1.15 of the Stedelijk Museum calls up Ulay at his most vital.

Sagri’s drawing extends the ongoing IASI series. These function as memory traces of her work with participants in one-on-one sessions, as “sensorial references” and as scores for the continuing treatments. In Windface, 2020, Sagri connects to her own body during a performance which inaugurated her exhibition at sunset (18:25 CET) on 24 October 2020. This trace may be also understood as a score for a second performance planned at sunrise on 30 November 2020, Ulay’s birthday.

In her video, Georgia Sagri incorporates different recordings made by witnesses of her sunset performance. The particular quality of the video material and how it has been edited bring focus to the artist, not as identifiable image, but as a body and a voice in preparation, in recovery. The name Breathing (7_1_7) encodes the balance between the breath in (7) and the breath out (7). In between there is a hold (1), a threshold.

Similarly to the balance between inhale and exhale, the sunset performance is balanced by one at sunrise. November 30, 2020, the first birthday of Ulay since his death on March 2, 2020, coincides with a lunar eclipse. Marking the fleeting and mystical moments of sunset and sunrise, the ending and beginning of night and day, Sagri marks out a space and time where the living and the departed may momentarily connect.

Curated by Danai Giannoglou with de Appel archivist Nell Donkers, designed by Bardhi Haliti. With thanks to the dedicated teams of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and ULAY Foundation.

THE EXHIBITION

With ULAY WAS HERE, the Stedelijk Museum presents the largest-ever retrospective of the groundbreaking oeuvre of Frank Uwe Laysiepen (1943–2020), known as Ulay. While the works that Ulay made with Marina Abramović are iconic, ULAY WAS HERE shows that he had an impressive solo oeuvre, both before and after their twelve-year collaboration. ULAY WAS HERE emphasizes that Ulay was one of the pioneers of Polaroid photography and performance and body art: experimental, uncompromising, and committed to social issues. Ulay had already begun working with the curators on this major survey before he passed away in March 2020.

Comprising approximately 200 works, some never before exhibited, ULAY WAS HERE examines entire oeuvre by pivoting around four key themes that amplify the contemporary relevance of his work: his focus on performance and the performative aspects of photography; his research into (gender) identity and his body as a medium; his engagement with social and political issues; and his relationship with Amsterdam, the city where he lived and worked for four decades. The exhibition includes photographs, Polaroids (both black and white and color, from small to life-size), Polagrams, sculptures, projections (video and photographic recordings of performances, films), and documentary material.

The exhibition Ulay Was Here is curated in close collaboration with the ULAY Foundation and generously supported by Fonds 21, Stedelijk Museum Fonds, Goethe-Institut Nederland and Profilex Framers.