This autumn, the Royal Academy of Arts is presenting the first major solo survey in the UK of the work of internationally acclaimed Serbian performance artist and Honorary Royal Academician, Marina Abramović.

The exhibition, arranged in close collaboration with the artist, gives an overview of her extraordinary practice with photographs, videos, objects and installations, including re performance of a few of Abramović’s remarkable performance pieces.

Originally trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Marina Abramović turned to performance in the early 1970s and established the hallmarks of her practice: every day actions ritualised through repetition and endurance. She is a pioneer in using the live body in her work and has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental tolerance. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualise the simple actions of everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.

Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy is powerful. Surprisingly, it is the first retrospective to be given to a female artist in the institution’s history. Throughout the journey from room to room, viewers are witnessing Abramovićs of different times, at different point of life, in her multiple guises. The exhibition opens with “Public Participation”, featuring two works in which she famously engaged directly with her audience: from the radical physical interaction of “Rhythm 0” to the quiet stillness of “The Artist is Present”.

Following on, “The Communist Body” will foreground Abramović’s origins in the former Yugoslavia and how Communist ideals, experienced socially as well as personally, have informed her practice. “Body Limits” brings together Abramović’s key early performances, presented through video and photographs. Some focus on the use of her body and her physical stamina, while others represent a search for transformative release.

Through her experiences of different cultures, Abramović became interested in how feats of endurance act as vehicles towards a mental leap of faith, a transcendence that goes beyond one’s own physical limitations. One of the re performance that left me in awe was “Luminosity”, where a female performer sits naked on a bicycle seat in a reincarnation of the Leonardo sketch of Vitruvian Man. It was powerful, profound yet seemingly painful study of anatomy and human fortitude. The final galleries focus on the transformative experience of performance art and equating this with different spiritual traditions, particularly giving shape to female spirituality. The show also documents many of the best of her performances, and re-performed by younger artists she has trained.

Abramović’s retrospective is terrifying, extreme, yet brave and powerful. I left the galleries being moved by her endurance and will power, and can’t stop contemplating about the limits of humanity.

Marina Abramović
23 September 2023 - 1 January 2024
Tickets on sale now