Marina Abramović

ALBERTINA MODERN, VIENNA

Marina Abramović (born 1946 in Belgrade) is one of the most eminent contemporary artists. Considered the founder of modern performance art, she has written art history with her legendary appearances. From her beginnings in the Belgrade of the 1970s, she has, over the course of a career spanning more than fifty years, firmly established performance as a genre of visual art. Already in 1978, she had her first appearance in Vienna at the International Performance Festival. The exhibition, curated for Vienna by Bettina M. Busse, will offer a comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre. The focus of the presentation at the Albertina Modern will be on reenactments of the historical performances, which will be shown daily throughout the exhibition. Performance art has a long tradition in Vienna, with Actionism as its best-known manifestation.

Marina Abramović’s early performance series Rhythm combined concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. Already it was about time, silence, energy, and the heightened awareness evoked by long-duration performances—themes that run through Abramović’s entire oeuvre. To her, the body was both subject and medium. By exposing herself to pain, total exhaustion, and danger, she kept pushing her physical and psychological limits, always in quest of emotional and spiritual transformation.

From 1976 to 1988, she performed together with her life partner Ulay (1943–2020). Since then, she has created solo works that involve more interaction with the audience, objects that invite participation, and performances such as The Artist Is Present, in which she gave visitors an opportunity to take turns sitting across from her at a table for one minute of silence each, eight hours a day for almost three months at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010. This performance finally made her known to a wide public.

For the retrospective, the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien will, in a collaborative exhibition design created with the artist, set up rooms that are each dedicated to a specific theme such as participation, communism, body limits, energy from nature, or enlightenment. Exhibits on display there will include early works created in Belgrade, the first solo performances, her collaboration with Ulay and the legendary joint performances, the participation-inviting Transitory Objects for Human Use, which marked the beginning of her second solo career, the spectacular Balkan Baroqueperformance, for which she received a Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, as well as more recent video and sculptural works. In addition, her installation Four Crosses (2019) will be shown in the nearby St. Rupert’s Church.

The exhibition is a cooperation between the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthaus Zürich, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna. It is created in close collaboration with the artist.

Organized by the Kunstforum Wien and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in cooperation with the Albertina, Vienna, the exhibition is on view at Albertina Modern from 10 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.