Georgia Sagri's Oikonomia at The Breeder Revisits Performance Art's Political Economy

Georgia Sagri's exhibition Oikonomia at The Breeder in Athens, running from 12 January to 4 February, revisits performances from the late 1990s to 2017, focusing on the invisible and often unpaid labor of artmaking. Curated by George Bekirakis and Danai Giannoglou, the show features damaged and unsold props, such as those from Landscape with Diogenes (2012/2023) and Breathing Scores (2017/2023), which are displayed on carton boxes or wooden hangers instead of walls. Sagri reenacts three previously undocumented works, including Rent (2009/2023), where she uses menstrual blood on banknote-sized papers, and Breathing (2003/2023), a five-hour performance amid debris. The exhibition includes drawings of props and five new typewritten texts with poetic recollections, highlighting what Sagri terms the 'pathologies of performance' in relation to productivity pressures. By offering works for sale, she critiques the market for performance-art documentation and calls for a redefinition of care in an art world where labor is exploited for capital accumulation. The show reframes the Greek concept of oikonomia, meaning economy or saving money, in the context of artmaking, drawing on Sagri's interest in practices of care, or Iasi, which means recovery in Greek.