In 1988, she walked the Wall of China for 90 days in the name of art: 36 years later, the world icon of performance Marina Abramovic presents her first exhibition in the Asian country, which she promises “radical” and “totally interactive”.
“I always dreamed of being able to perform here,” confides the 77-year-old Serbian artist with long black hair in an interview with AFP, a few days before the inauguration Thursday at the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art of the “Transforming Energy” exhibition.
“To perform here, you have to be invited… and now, I’m invited,” she rejoices.
A long wait which allowed her, she says, to create something “very different from any other show”, a “totally interactive” exhibition.
“I believe that China deserves something that is very, very radical, and that is very radical,” assures Marina Abramovic.
When she had traveled the Wall, China was just beginning to open up to the world. At the time, she and German artist Ulay, her longtime companion and creative partner, planned to marry after each walking from one end of the Wall to meet.
The Chinese bureaucracy decided otherwise: Beijing took so many years to agree to the project that their relationship was already on the rocks when the performance began.
Their reunion halfway on the Wall had therefore sealed their separation.
– “Technology detox” –
In Shanghai, the exhibition retraces this experience, through more than a thousand photos and videos, and also presents dozens of new pieces.
Visitors are encouraged to walk under certain works, or even lie down on them, but another recommendation will undoubtedly be more difficult to follow for the Chinese, their eyes often glued to their screen: that of putting away their phone during the visit.
“I really want there to be a technology detox in this show,” Marina Abramovic explains to AFP.
“People should talk to each other, people should fall in love with each other. And this exhibition is, in an almost romantic way, a return to simplicity,” she says.
Because “I don’t like seeing young people sitting together at the table texting each other, we have lost simple human contact”, sighs the artist.
Born in a town in Belgrade that was still Yugoslav, the artist made herself known with audacious work, which pushes the limits and erases the border between the performer’s body and her art, often with the assistance of the public.
In one of her most famous performances, “Rhythm 0”, in 1974, she sat motionless in a chair for six hours while the audience was given 72 objects to “use” – including flowers, knives and a gun – on her as he pleased.
Some members of the public eventually became violent, realizing they could act with impunity.
More recently, at this year’s Glastonbury Festival in England, Marina Abramovic, dressed in a white dress in the shape of the peace symbol, led around 100 attendees to observe seven minutes of silence.
– Second “home” –
People “like to be part of something, on a very human level,” believes the Serbian artist.
“I don’t lie, I tell the truth, I don’t pretend anything else, I show myself vulnerable and in a way it’s real,” she explains. And “I feel an incredible amount of love, and that also gives me a great responsibility.”
The China of today has nothing to do with the one she knew on the Wall: during her performance in 1988, she was escorted by a group of soldiers sent by the government, as well as an interpreter .
“I never saw a single car in 1988, there were only bicycles,” she remembers.
And in each village where she stopped, along the Wall, she spoke to the oldest villagers, who told her legends filled with dragons.
Now, in her Shanghai hotel, she sees robots serving food to customers.
But the country remains like a second “home” for her, which draws parallels with her own childhood as the daughter of communist officials.
“I come from communism, I am a hard worker, I am very disciplined and very dedicated,” assures Marina Abramovic. Likewise, “the Chinese are hard workers”.
When asked about the irony of seeing her works welcomed today by a communist government when in the past they were criticized in Yugoslavia, she evades, refusing to talk politics because, she says, her work It’s not political.
