From Naples to Warsaw: SAGG Napoli on show at the Polish Museum of Modern Art

At the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, curator Natalia Sielewicz will oversee the first SAGG Napoli’s international residency who launched her institutional exhibition with an overflowing new performance. The dialectal title of her unedited project marks her last performative intervention, named Chell ca vec aniell ke trasn a stient e perzon che pensn 'ca fed è na croc e diaman (What I see is rings that barely fit and people that believe faith is a diamond cross). The project took part of Department of Presence’s September edition, titled Pride and Prejudice. New Practices of Dignity. MMA in Warsaw is actually hosting artistic and performative interventions, debates and concerts problematizing tensions associated with the codes of class, racial and sexual identification. Thanks to a plot and a dramaturgy proper of a non-exhibition, Pride and Prejudice: New Practices of Dignity takes place over a period of four weeks in four stages.

Each chapter has a separate spatial manifestation and a performative intervention prepared specially by each of five invited artists. Anna Niesterowicz focuses on the problem of hate speech. SAGG Napoli is the only Italian artist invited and she advocates the aesthetics and the politics of the South. Mikołaj Sobczak deals with the widely-understood exclusion in relation to politics of memory and the drag queen movement. Finally, Wojciech Puś together with a group of performers defines new fields of queer abstraction, an inclusive community based upon a sensual practice of time and space.

SAGG Napoli (acronym for Sofia Ginevra Giannì, b. 1991, Naples) is an Italian artist graduated from Fine Art al Camberwell College of Arts in London. Her heaped-up work uses narration as a tool to examine complex socio-political layers: intertwining southern daily life aesthetics, historical traces and geo-political entanglements. The time she embodies refers to current divisions between peoples and countries, amid increasing territorial acts and cultural biases. Her referring context is Naples, the city of her origins. Assuming that specific urban model as a starting point, the artist narrates the peculiar history of the city, about domination and struggle, sensitive enough to permeate and react to foreign models. Through a practice of critical observation and auto-biographical, intimate immersion, videos, sculptures and publishing materials as pièce de rèsistance are assembled together with fragments of a fashionable criticism, an act of personal resistance, absorbing Southern stilemas.

Within Chell ca vec aniell ke trasn a stient e perzon che pensn 'ca fed è na croc e diaman, the artist placed the body within a specific time and context, reflecting on the notions of productivity, self-control, and achievement. SAGG Napoli observes how the South, vulnerable to exploitation but at the same time regarded by the West as possessing a symbolic excess of identity, which it could become a space of multi-level meanings and contradictions. At a time when phantasms of marginalized and excluded groups and their symbolic position within the social and cultural sphere are often exploited via violent appropriations, SAGG Napoli’s practice questions consumption processes as hesitations that need to be posed and remains more poignant than ever.