By Angelo Amante
VENICE, May 4 (Reuters) – A pile of plaster bones greeted visitors at a preview in Venice on Monday of Marina Abramovic’s latest exhibition, while guides in white coats encouraged guests to interact with crystal objects to help them detox from modern technology.
Abramovic, the Serbian pioneer of performance art, who turns 80 this year, inaugurated “Transforming Energy” at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, days before the official opening of the Biennale International Art Exhibition.
She is the first living woman artist to present an exhibition at the Gallerie, Venice’s leading fine art museum, which is home to Renaissance masterpieces.
“The only important thing about this show is that you have to take time and detox from technology,” Abramovic told a press conference, urging visitors to spend more than just a few minutes at the exhibition if they wanted to fully experience it.
Curator Shai Baitel said the artist was asking people to put away their phones and focus on themselves, allowing energy to flow from the minerals into them.
THIS TIME THE PUBLIC IS ASKED TO PERFORM
Given Abramovic’s reputation as a performance artist, Baitel told Reuters the exhibition was rare in asking “the public to perform, to connect to the artwork, because otherwise it’s incomplete”.
The bones in the first room pay tribute to “Balkan Baroque,” Abramovic’s performance that won the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, when she sat for days on top of a pile of cow bones and tried, unsuccessfully, to scrub them clean of blood.
She said that work was to mark the conflict that in the 1990s ravaged the former Yugoslavia where she was born.
The new show seeks to establish a dialogue between her work and the Renaissance masterpieces hanging in the Gallerie.
For instance, a still image entitled “Pieta,” staged with her longtime partner Ulay, is displayed in front of Titian’s painting of the same name that depicts the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus Christ.
(Reporting by Angelo Amante; editing by Barbara Lewis)
