Marina Abramovic: “If I’m not afraid of pain, you shouldn’t be afraid of it”

Published on November 2, 2024 at 08:04.

“My diary is full until 2027,” declared Marina Abramovic in Zurich on October 24, as the opening Marina Abramovic – Retrospective. «The exhibition, she continues, addressing a crowd of journalists, is made to show the public what I did with my life for fifty-five years [l’artiste aura 78 ans le 30 novembre]. And not so that I look at myself […] In a way, it doesn’t interest me, because everything that is there no longer needs to be done. I designed, experimented, lived all these works.”

Indeed, after London and Amsterdam, the Kunsthaus Zurich exhibits its most emblematic works, sometimes in the form of a re-performance, such as Imponderabilia (1977) which opens the exhibition, or Luminosity (1997). Installations, photos, videos sometimes, recall past exploits, such as Rhythm 0produced for the first time in Naples in 1974, where a series of objects – from the pistol to the rose, including lipstick and knives – allowed the public to adorn, entertain or torture a Marina Abramovic offered for several hours to his whims. Further, the photographs of The Artist Is Present (2010) show her sitting, motionless, for three months, in a room at MoMA in New York, while members of the public follow one another in front of her. There are the legendary, and sometimes terrifying, performances carried out with Ulay, his love and his artistic double from the 1970s and 1980s, like Rest Energy (1980) or The Great Wall Walk, reflections of a long three-month march on the Great Wall of China in 1988, at the end of which they separated.