Serbian artist Marina Abramović celebrates her 80th birthday with Transforming Energy at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, where visitors become performers by activating her installations.
The Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, who studied painting at the Academies of Fine Arts in Belgrade and Zagreb in the 1970s, celebrates her eightieth birthday this year with a series of exhibitions in Austria, Slovenia, Germany and Italy. In Venice, to coincide with the Art Biennale, she presents Transforming Energy (until 18 October 2026), a series of installations that invite the audience to participate actively. Indeed, participation is integral to the exhibition: visitors take the artist’s place and, by activating the energy of the works, become performers themselves.
TRANSFORMING ENERGY: THE ABRAMOVIĆ METHOD AND AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
On the ground floor of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, in the spaces once occupied by the historic Accademia di Belle Arti, Abramović presents her celebrated Transitory Objects, works that call for an intimate, sustained and meditative form of engagement. The exercise Opening and Closing door is particularly telling: “Very slowly open a door, without stepping on the threshold. Close it and open it again. Again and again”. It is precisely through continuous repetition – the cornerstone of the Abramović Method – that the deeper meaning of the work is meant to emerge.
“After one hour it gets better; after three hours the door is no longer a door”, the artist explains.
But how can such an insistence on duration be reconciled with the conditions of contemporary museum spectatorship, in which the average encounter with a work of art lasts a mere fifteen to thirty seconds? More importantly, what happens to these transformative processes once they leave the ground-floor white cube, with its stark chiaroscuro contrasts, and enter the galleries of the museum above, where they encounter masterpieces by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto?
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ AND THE CANONIZATION OF PERFORMANCE ART
Here, several of Abramović’s objects, vaguely reminiscent of Dutch wooden clogs, have been placed in front of Paolo Veronese’s monumental Feast in the House of Levi (1573). Visitors, however, are not permitted to step onto them: labels identify the works as “temporarily unavailable for use”. The participatory premise of the work is thus neutralized by the institutional logic of the museum: what was conceived to be activated is reduced to an object of contemplation. The audience is denied the very encounter on which the works depend, precluding from the outset any possibility of activating the energy between the lived reality of the present and a historical context in which, not incidentally, female figures are conspicuously marginalized within this sixteenth-century religious painting. What remains instead is a static juxtaposition. It becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the pairing serves above all to position Marina Abramović within the canon of European art history, inscribing her permanently into the museum’s cultural memory: a majestic Becoming Academy.
The dialogue between contemporary and historical art becomes considerably more focused – and more convincing – in other encounters staged throughout the exhibition. The parallel between Abramović’s photographic work Pietà, documenting a 1983 tableau vivant in which she cradles the body of her long-time partner Ulay, and Titian’s late Pietà (c. 1575 – 76), left unfinished at the artist’s death and subsequently completed by Palma il Giovane, is particularly effective. Through a carefully calibrated spatial arrangement, Abramović’s self-representation mirrors both the iconography and the emotional charge of the grieving Virgin in Titian’s painting, sublimating private grief into a universal register.
Yet this development raises a more fundamental question: is Abramović’s late practice increasingly shaped by a transformation of the ephemeral and performative into the permanent, monumental and institutionally sanctioned? The phenomenon is hardly new; it was already powerfully evident in her 2023 retrospective at the Royal Academy in London. In Venice, however, this transition towards the status of a classic finds its most explicit expression in Abramović’s institutional canonization. To coincide with the opening of the exhibition, Abramović delivered a lectio magistralis to a capacity audience at the new premises of the Accademia di Belle Arti – an appearance that itself assumed the character of an institutional rite of passage, positioning the artist not only as a protagonist of performance history but as an authoritative figure addressing its next generation. The setting acquires particular resonance in Venice, where Abramović herself had once occupied the position of radical Biennale protagonist: in 1997, Balkan Baroque, her harrowing meditation on violence, memory and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, earned her the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale. Nearly three decades later, the former agent of disruption returns as an established figure of art history, addressing a generation for whom her once transgressive practice has itself become a point of reference. This sense of generational transmission was equally palpable among the students. “For our generation, Abramović represents far more than a seminal figure in performance art: she embodies the uncompromising assertion of female artistic agency”, observed Sofia Kostin, an Italian-Russian art student who attended the event.
If Abramović now embodies the institutionalization of performance, the contrast with the younger generation of Performance Art currently present in the Lagoon could hardly be more striking. One inevitably thinks of the explosive performative installations by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger in the Austrian Pavilion (Seaworld Venice). Where Abramović has become static, museal and canonical, Holzinger responds with fluid bodies, a hyper-contemporary aesthetic and a visceral mode of provocation that jolts the 2026 Biennale out of complacency. It is precisely within this generational divide that the title Becoming Academy reveals its double edge: the well-earned triumph of history, but also the waning of the dangerous unpredictability that once defined Abramović’s practice.
FROM LIVING BODY TO DIGITAL MEMORY: THE FUTURE OF ABRAMOVIĆ’S LEGACY
A more disquieting manifestation of this shift appears within Transforming Energy itself. On the wall presenting Abramović’s biography, an AI-generated likeness of the artist moves across the biographical display. Her life is thus not only narrated through dates, places and events: the artist herself re-enters this chronology as a digitally animated presence. The effect is subtly unsettling. What is ostensibly a documentary account of a life becomes the setting for its technological reanimation.
The intervention Slow walk is particularly significant in the context of Abramović’s practice. Where her early performances depended upon the physical presence and vulnerability of the artist’s body – exposed to duration, contingency and risk – the moving figure requires no such presence. Detached from the living body, it can appear repeatedly, traversing the account of the artist’s own past while remaining untouched by time. Biography and simulation consequently occupy the same visual field: the historical Marina Abramović, reconstructed through the chronology of her life, encounters a technologically generated version of herself in the present.
The animation thus extends a development already apparent elsewhere in the exhibition. The living body, once at the center of an encounter bound to a particular moment and situation, is increasingly accompanied – and at times replaced – by its mediated image. This becomes particularly evident here. Abramović has spent decades making duration and bodily presence central to her work; now a digital version of the artist moves through the representation of her own history. Her physical presence is replaced by an image that can return again and again. In this way, the animation raises a question that extends beyond the preservation of performance: how Marina Abramović herself is becoming part of the history that the exhibition presents.
LINK
- Becoming Academy: Marina Abramović in Venice - September 18, 2026
- The Generative Dispositif of Institutional Memory. An Interview with Dayanita Singh - June 19, 2026
- Mark Rothko in Florence - March 27, 2026
