25 September—8:30 pm
Event
MY WORDS TO MY MOTHER: I’M BECOMING MONSTER, YOU’RE BECOMING (M)OTHER
Performance by Johnna Sachpazis
Drawing on her experiences, Johnna Sahpazis, as a trans girl (she/her), explores the materiality and becoming of the Queer and Trans body through concepts such as trauma, embodied memory, affect theory and the post-human future.
Her work focuses on visual and sensory explorations between photography, sculpture and painting, creating post-Frankensteinian figures inspired by Susan Stryker’s work on the performance of ‘Trans Rage’.
As part of the parallel public program of the exhibition ‘Murderesses’, Johnna presents a performance-monologue for the first time at State of Concept Athens. Intensely emotional ‘trans thoughts’ as she calls them about her body, her transformation, her journey, her discomfort and her euphoria.
As a response she never got to say, to her mother’s dramatic and abusive words when she learned last Christmas that she was going to begin her hormone-induced gender transition.
She uses the figure of the monster in her bondage to reflect the stigmatization of ‘monstrous’ others, especially the Trans bodies in patriarchal societies. By embracing and re-imagining the monster as a metaphor for the Trans experience, her work aims to highlight the marginalized emotional distress often experienced by Queer people. In this way, feelings of rage are transformed into a tool of resistance against social norms that reproduce bodily identities according to immutable dichotomies.
Performance as a ritual of becoming, a funeral of the old self, seeks to evoke a seeing that is neither internal nor external, neither as part of the self nor the other. We are constantly becoming in a dynamic and ambivalent intermediate state. The aim is for the viewer to truly embrace this emotional and sensory state.
Part of the public program of the group exhibition “Murderesses” curated by Konstantina Melachrinou and iLiana Fokianaki with the participation of Eleni Karakou, Markella Ksilogiannopoulou, Miammy, Malvina Panagiotidi, Eva Papamargariti, with new and older commissions. The exhibition explores the archetype of the dangerous woman – femininity that threatens patriarchy, imitating its violent means and tools in the effort of self-determination, salvation and emancipation.
Johnna Sahpazis is a visual artist from Athens (b. 1996). She graduated with distinction from the MA Fine Art programme at Camberwell College of Arts (University of the Arts London, 2020-2021) and has studied photography at Middlesex University, London. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in various art spaces in London and Athens, including Marika Hybrid Space, Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), MOMus – Museum Alex Mylona, UPPER ANKYLE, Oneroom Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, South London Gallery, Webber Gallery, Copeland Gallery, Space52, a.antonopoulou.art gallery.
In April 2021, The Sunday Times’ Culture magazine included her in the list of “12 future stars of the art world you need to know”. She has been awarded by ARTWORKS (2022) and is a Fellow of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artists Support Programme.