PRESENTATION: Marina Abramović

Since the beginning of her career in the early 1970s when Marina Abramović attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galleri F 15 Archive

Marina Abramović’s solo exhibition at Galleri F 16 offers a profound meditation on five decades of an artist who has continually expanded the boundaries of performance and redefined the relationship between body, mind, and audience. Gathering together works in performance, video, photography, and installation, the exhibition surveys Abramović’s evolving engagement with endurance, presence, nature, energy, and mortality. Structured across seven thematic chapters, it traces not only the chronology of her practice but also its metaphysical trajectory—from corporeal confrontation to spiritual transcendence.

The exhibition begins with early performances and key collaborations with Ulay, including “Art Must Be Beautiful”, “Artist Must Be Beautiful”, “Rest Energy”, “Imponderabilia”, and “The Hero”. These works encapsulate the intensity and risk that mark Abramović’s early explorations into the limits of physical and psychological experience. In this section “Physical and Mental Borders,” the artist’s body becomes both medium and message—a site of resistance, vulnerability, and transformation. The audience, positioned as silent witnesses, are drawn into the charged space between endurance and collapse, intimacy and alienation. Through pain and repetition, Abramović reveals art as a test of consciousness and the body as a conduit for truth.

The 2010 performance “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA marked a pivotal moment in Abramović’s career—a culmination of decades of inquiry into the dynamics of presence. Seated in silence, facing more than 1,600 participants over three months, she transformed stillness into an act of radical openness. In the aftermath of this performance, Abramović turned toward nature as both refuge and teacher. Works such as “Holding the Goat”, “Holding the Lamb”, “Black Sheep”, and “Portrait with Black Lamb”, gathered under the theme “Back to Simplicity,” express a return to elemental forces and an embrace of humility before the natural world. The body, once a site of ordeal, becomes a vessel for reconnection and grounding.

In “Domestic Life,” Abramović transposes the sacred into the everyday. Works including “The Cleaner”, “Portrait with Potatoes”, “Portrait with Onions”, “The Kitchen II”, and The Kitchen VII” transform household rituals—cleaning, cooking, and caretaking—into acts of spiritual contemplation. The kitchen becomes a metaphorical and literal site of alchemy, where the ordinary is transfigured through repetition, labor, and attention. This section suggests that transcendence is not found apart from daily life but within it.

“Places of Power” draws upon Abramović’s deep engagement with Brazil, where she studied the energetic and spiritual properties of crystals. Works such as “The Current” and “Floating” reflect her enduring fascination with the invisible energies that connect all living things. These explorations extend into “Meditative States,” where “Water Study” and “Black Dragon” invite viewers into spaces of stillness and introspection. The emphasis shifts from performance as spectacle to performance as invitation—an opening toward inner transformation.

In “Transforming Energy,” Abramović continues her dialogue with materials and matter. Works like “Dozing Consciousness” and “Shoes for Departure” blur the line between object and experience, encouraging direct interaction. Here, participation becomes a mode of awareness: the viewer is not a spectator but a co-creator in the circulation of energy between human, object, and environment. The crystalline materials she employs resonate with her belief in art as an energetic exchange capable of altering perception.

The final section, “Death,” brings the artist’s inquiry full circle. In works such as “Nude with Skeleton”, “Holding the Skeleton”, “Portrait with Matches”, and “The Kitchen VIII”, Abramović confronts the inevitability of mortality with unflinching honesty. The recurring motif of the skeleton speaks to both the burden and liberation of death—a reminder of the body’s impermanence and the spirit’s persistence. Death, for Abramović, is not an end but a threshold: the ultimate test of presence.

Across its seven chapters, the exhibition at Galleri F 16 maps the evolution of an artist who has consistently turned her own body into a site of revelation. Abramović’s journey—from endurance and pain to silence and contemplation—mirrors a universal quest for meaning, connection, and transcendence. Her art compels us to confront our own thresholds: the limits of perception, the boundaries of empathy, and the inevitability of impermanence. In doing so, it affirms the power of presence—not merely as a performance, but as a way of being.

Photo: Marina Abramović, The Current, Performance for video, 1 hour, Brazil 2017, © Marina Abramović, Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives

 Info: Curators: Pennington and Maria C. Havstam, Galleri F 15, Albyalléen 60, Moss, Norway, Duration: 28/0/20251/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://gallerif15.no/