ABOUT

Sophia Giovannitti will execute her extended work Incall: Study 2; Contract at DUPLEX, on view from March 5–April 6 at 17 Essex Street. The work will open March 5th off-site with a performance at the Bowery Hotel.

For the duration of the show, the gallery will be closed to the public. Daily inhabiting a bed in the white cube space, Giovannitti will take Contract appointments by request, thereby permitting entry to the gallery and access to the artist. 

Participants in Contract will follow instruction-based choreographies to build a transactional agreement with the artist, founded upon the desires of the participant and the material and financial needs of the artist. Contract may be subject to audio recording by the artist. While the content of the transactional agreement itself may become public (with all participating parties sufficiently anonymized), the fulfillment of the terms laid out in any agreements will remain a private matter between the artist and the participant—unless the artist determines the participant is in grave breach of Contract and must recoup her value lost through a public means, at her discretion. To begin the process of building terms, each participant will pay Duplex a $1,000 non-refundable deposit in cash, its equivalent at the time in Ethereum, or bank transfer. Through Contract, Giovannitti offers individuals the opportunity to purchase their own desire. All desires come with attendant, bespoke costs. 

The artist’s private sphere is the space wherein subsequent market-value is not only initially produced, but repeatedly dipped back into to reify, increase, and uphold said market value, once established; Giovannitti seeks to make access to it—rather than free, or paid in a form of cultural capital or sweat equity—costly. She embarks on a fool’s errand: making transparent and concrete the opaque systems of eroticized exchange facilitating value extraction from artists by those in positions of material and cultural power. The art market’s current system of value extraction from artists relies on both parties’ aspirational uncertainty toward what the other might eventually offer them, facilitating participation in an intimate game of possibility, innuendo, dangling, and exploitation. The system glitches when the terms are made plain, potentially allowing new forms of value production to occur. 

Within this study, Giovannitti’s conceptual focus on the contract stems from its criminalization; prostitution is, indeed, a discursive crime, occuring when two parties mutually agree upon the commodification of an erotic desire and its fulfillment. Its subsequent fulfillment, or lack thereof, is legally irrelevant—thus, the crime of solicitation. Giovannitti seeks to push the criminalization and alienation of erotic contracting to its limits. Further, she posits that contracted labor—of any kind—and its implicit power structures are inextricably bound to the erotic, precipitating the inevitable failures of the #metoo movement to effectively legislate or fearmonger sex out of the workplace. She seeks to intervene in the crosshairs of sex, power, and labor through the lens of indulgence, rather than prohibition, asking her participants what they want from her, and what they are willing to give up in return.

Full press release here.

BIO

Sophia Giovannitti is a conceptual artist who lives in New York. She studies the commodification of parts of ourselves we hold dear, positing, from a materialist perspective, that there is no way out but through. Her work exists in this through-space of sale, scam, and reflection.

Through her series of Incall studies, she seeks to embody and re-choreograph the flow of capital through the art and sex industries. Her first extended performance piece, Untitled (Incall), took place in residence at Recess from May–June 2021. Her first short film, produced by Tourmaline, In Heaven: An Alternate Reality Game, premiered at the Athens Biennale in September 2021; her second short film, Dirty Calculations, premiered on Cryptographic.Art in December 2021. Her first book, Working Girl, is forthcoming from Verso in 2023.

She is open to commission and solicitation.