MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ. The Art of Crossing Boundaries
Few artists have reshaped our understanding of what art can be as radically as Marina Abramović. For more than five decades, she has made the human body — her own body — both medium and message, testing endurance, pain, vulnerability, and transcendence. In the process, she has transformed performance from a marginal experiment into one of the defining forms of contemporary art.
The new retrospective at Albertina Modern, curated by Bettina M. Busse, brings together the full arc of Abramović’s career — from the early, brutal precision of Rhythm 10 (1973), in which she stabs a series of knives between her fingers until her hands are bloodied, to the silent, deeply affecting The Artist Is Present (2010), where she sat across from visitors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for more than 700 hours.
Busse leads us through the exhibition in the accompanying film, tracing the evolution of Abramović’s art from acts of physical extremity to meditations on energy, nature, and mortality. Works such as Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist placed herself at the mercy of the audience and its aggression; Balkan Baroque (1997), her haunting confrontation with war, guilt, and personal history; and Nude with Skeleton (2002–05), a quiet reflection on impermanence inspired by Tibetan monastic practice, reveal the artist’s lifelong negotiation between violence and vulnerability, body and spirit.
Abramović’s connection to Austria also runs deep — from Lips of Thomas (1974) in Innsbruck, a performance so intense the audience intervened to save her, to this new retrospective in Vienna, which offers the rare chance to experience the totality of her work.
The film invites viewers not only to witness Abramović’s art but to share in its central proposition: that true transformation requires courage — and that art can be a passage to another state of being.
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