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, and Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien. It is created in close collaboration with the artist.