![]() ![]() ![]() The space in between marina abramovic full#Here the interchangeable personae of Maria/Marina is rendered even more complex with the spectacle of Willem Dafoe dressed in a full length gold sequinned gown and walking hand in hand into the fire with Abramovic, who wears a tuxedo and assumes the male role of the Roman Pollione. The climax of the film is Bellini’s Norma, sung by Callas more often than any other opera. Rather than leaping off castle battlements, Abramovic’s Tosca launches herself from a Manhattan skyscraper while the ritual suicide of Madame Butterfly is replaced by the artist ripping off a Hazmat suit and exposing herself to radiation poisoning. Instead of being strangled at the hands of Othello, as in Verdi’s opera, in Abramovic’s version Desdemona is throttled by two boa constrictors that, with grim tenderness, Dafoe drapes around her neck while the jealous murder of Carmen in Bizet’s opera is recreated with Dafoe and Abramovic-the latter in full matador rig-messing with the traditional power dynamic by staging their own torero involving Dafoe being reeled in at the end of a rope and Abramovic brandishing the knife that ultimately brings about her demise. In each case Abramovic, working with the actor Willem Dafoe, complicates the notion of the tragic heroine often dying at the hands of a man by adding a new twist or interpretation. These anomalies and complications run through her stunning high octane Seven Deaths, a new film work in which Abramovic acts out the tragic and sometimes grisly deaths of seven operatic heroines, each one performed to the soundtrack of Callas singing the original solo or aria. And then my work saved me." While strongly empathising with Callas, Abramovic also admits that, "I also kind of blame her-when you have the talent she had, you are not allowed to give up, because this talent doesn’t just belong to you, it belongs to all of us." Also she really died for love," she says adding that "once I was also so much in love in my life: I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even think. It might seem incongruous for the queen of radical performance to be drawn to the great diva of bel-canto, but Abramovic strongly identified with what she describes as Callas’s "mixture of stress and vulnerability: she was so strong on stage but so unhappy in her life. Still from Marina Abramovic's Seven Deaths (2021) "I started crying, I don’t know why-the voice was so emotional for me.” she remembers. Both revolve around her enduring passion for the Greek American soprano Maria Callas, whose voice the teenage Abramovic first heard on the airwaves in her grandmother’s Belgrade kitchen. One is in the gallery’s main galleries in Lisson Street, and one in their temporary pop up space in Cork Street. More long lasting are her two shows at Lisson Gallery which also opened this week and run through into October. These included a giant quartz crystal, the writings of her late friend Susan Sontag, a stone from Mars and the miraculously resilient desert plant Rose of Jericho-all things she believes “we have to preserve for the future”. There she immersed audiences in Traces, a five room extravaganza of video works, soundscapes, light pieces and sculpture which focused on some of her most significant objects and ideas. Her Royal Academy of Arts exhibition may have been postponed until 2023, but that hasn't stopped Marina Abramovic from taking London by storm.įor just three days last weekend (between 10-12 September)-in collaboration with We Present, the digital arts arm of WeTransfer-performance art’s best known figure marked her arrival by taking over the Old Truman Brewery in Whitechapel. ![]()
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