A spectacular and brilliantly staged exhibition titled simply "Marina Abramović" has opened at the Albertina Modern in Vienna, featuring not only films, photographs, and objects, but also live performers, some nude, acting directly in the gallery spaces. The show's directness makes it closer to a stations-of-the-cross theater than a traditional museum experience, marking new territory for the Albertina, according to institutional director Klaus Albrecht Schröder.
While nothing presented in this exhibition, previously shown in London, Amsterdam, and Zurich, is entirely new, the majority of works are classics of performance art that Abramović, born in Belgrade in 1946, has shaped, explored, and popularized like no other artist. The daughter of two Tito partisans consistently pushed herself to the limit: in 1973, she injured herself with knives, stabbing them increasingly faster between her fingers. Photographs of this performance caught the attention of gallerist Ursula Krinzinger, in whose Innsbruck gallery Abramović performed "Lips of Thomas" in 1975.
During "Lips of Thomas," she carved a five-pointed star into her stomach and lay on a cross made of ice blocks while a heat lamp burned down on the wound from above. This was not the first time Abramović had performed her actions to the point of unconsciousness and beyond. Such radicality never emerged in a vacuum: the way political repression under the communist regime turned against one's own body and developed symbolic protest power there can be clearly read from Abramović's works.
Throughout her career, one encounters a Christian-based idea of sacrifice: those who take on the pain of the world emerge transformed—even redeemed—from the process. Suffering is transformed into strength through constant endurance. The performance "Balkan Baroque," in which Abramović processed the horrors of the Balkan War at the 1997 Venice Biennale by scrubbing 1,500 cattle bones, seemed to connect the political and ascetic strands of her work.
The archaic symbolic repertoire is probably only one reason why Abramović's works continue to have such an impact in 2025: the artist is also a master of transformation when it comes to adapting her ideas for new contexts. The curation adds another layer to this effect. In the central room of the exhibition, photos and videos of events that took place decades ago and were rather poorly documented at the time now radiate in large formats and a magnificent interplay.
Many works date from the period between 1976 and 1988, when Abramović created timeless images of interpersonal conflict with her partner Ulay: the couple sucked the air out of each other during a kiss, screamed at each other until exhaustion, and literally knotted themselves together by their hair. One wonders how this exhibition would have looked at its originally planned location, the now-closed Bank Austria Kunstforum, where the rooms would have necessitated walking through a sequence of spaces and back again.
For Abramović, however, there was no going back after her separation from Ulay in 1988. The circular route that the rooms of the Albertina Modern allow now leads to a new level of transformation—entering spiritual territory. Abramović's turn toward energy-giving crystals, essence-changing lying and sitting devices ("Transitory Objects"), and meditations at symbolically significant places like the Asian banyan tree, as displayed in the exhibition, is, to put it mildly, ambivalent.
Abramović herself is eager to present such works as a logical continuation of her transformative endurance performances. This can be argued—as can the view that her art at some point entered a mystical phase that, with transfigured photos and peculiar objects, produces more marketable products than the grainy documents of the bloody radical performances of yesteryear. With two enormous crosses and a portal lined with illuminated crystals through which visitors are invited to step ("Per aspera ad astra!"), the exhibition certainly lays it on rather thick toward the end.
Nevertheless, this towering figure of performance art will not be presented so well and extensively again anytime soon. The exhibition "Marina Abramović" runs until March 1, 2026, at the Albertina Modern. Originally planned by the Bank Austria Kunstforum, after the closure of its spaces on Vienna's Freyung, curator Bettina Busse implemented the project as a cooperation between both institutions, with Bank Austria still acting as sponsor. Due to expected crowds, opening hours have been extended from Saturday to Tuesday until 9 PM.
