Georgia Sagri
Le Grand Désenvoûtement

As part of the exhibition Le Grand Désenvoûtement [Spiritual Healing] at Palais de Tokyo, Georgia Sagri presents a selection of drawings from this process of autonomous self-care. Over the course of the session, volunteers take up position on a stage covered in mattress. The exercises of diaphragm vibration that the artist proposes enable them to observe and localize within their bodies the pains that are symptoms of contemporary lifestyles and social and professional injunctions. Drawing is one tool used by the artist in this process for identifying pain. Through their titles and their visual cues, the drawings presented in this exhibition, which were created in 2020, individually attest to collective ills which enter into resonance here with the reality of a cultural institution that is also a possible pool of more or less unconscious pathologies.

Elsewhere, Georgia Sagri links these cartographies of pain to an incisive analysis of the art field through a reading of texts from her collection Stage of Recovery (Divided Publishing, 2021), which will take place on Friday 9 December at 6PM.

Georgia Sagri is a multidiscilpinary artist whose activist and artistic practice is founded upon autonomy, individual and collective empowerment, and self-organization. She uses performance as a means of unsettling belief systems, particularly as they exist within institutions. The endurance that she mobilizes in her performance and her occupations of public space have led her to develop techniques of warming-up and physical wellbeing based on breathing. Since 2020, she has shared these methods through in- person sessions under the name IASI, the Greek word for “recovery”.