SALOON: There is no country in our hearts
Premiere of film by Georgia Sagri. Artist in conversation with Monika Szczukowska

  • SALOON: There is no country in our hearts

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites to the premiere screening of a new work from the Museum collection - the film “SALOON: There is no country in our hearts” by the Greek artist Georgia Sagri. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist and curator of the project Monika Szczukowska.

The film “SALOON: There is no country in our hearts” records the artist’s series of four performances under the same title at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013. The performances took place within the context of the museum collection exhibition “In the heart of the country”, but were not part of the show. The film includes texts in the form of subtitles, art works from the Museum's collection and of the invited artists, activated during the different performances, as well as diagrams that emerged during the film's editing process.

The film was developed under the condition of future uses and purposes without historicizing or framing a past event, that of a performance or of an exhibition. As such the film is not a documentation of a performance but a promotion of SALOON – a nomadic curatorial project the artist started in 2009 - and it announces its desire to continue to operate.

SALOON (2009-ongoing) manifests Sagri's involvement in ideas of movement, flee, and deterritorialization. "SALOON derives just out of need for enjoyment and constant change. Assuming there is no passive and active, inside and outside, representation and representatives what kind of social grounds can be created?" - asks Sagri. 

Georgia Sagri, born 1979, is a Greek artist based in New York and Athens. She studied music at the National Music School of Athens; she holds a BA from Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens, and an MFA from Columbia University, New York. At the center of her 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. In addition to performance pieces she has been developing in the past fifteen years, a great part of her artistic output comprises video and computer works, texts, installations, and drawings. Most of her work is influenced from her on-going engagement in political movements and struggles, on issues of autonomy, empowerment, and self-organization. Her first institutional solo show, curated by Adam Szymczyk, was under the title "Mona Lisa Effect", at Kunsthalle Basel in 2014. She was included in 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 Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; KW, Berlin; Arnolfini, Bristol; 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. In 2009 she founded the audio-only magazine FORTÉ (www.magazineforte.com), and SALOON, an ongoing curatorial project. In 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE (www.hyle.gr/www.hyle.mobi), a social and artistic experiment in the center of Athens at Omonoia Square, that aims to cultivate matter by people (artists, philosophers, scientists, and passersby) with an urgency to manifest the attitudes and vocabularies of another society.
In 2015 Sagri received a prestigious Artadia Award. She is participating in 14th Istanbul Biennial 2015, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

Monika Szczukowska is an independent curator and art historian. She curated Georgia Sagri’s "SALOON: There is no country in our hearts" at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013, as part of a larger performance series extending the frameworks and readings of the museum’s collection exhibition “In the heart of the country”. Also for MoMA Warsaw, she curated performance and exhibition of Sharon Hayes’ "In the near future, Warsaw" in 2008. Between 1989 and 1995 she worked at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw together with Wiesław Borowski and Andrzej Przywara, where she co-organized exhibitions of Mirosław Bałka, Edward Krasiński, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, among others. She is currently curating a new performance of Georgia Sagri with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy), to be presented in October 2015 in Bunkier Sztuki, Cracow. She lives and works in New York.

See also: