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We’ve been promised a major Marina Abramović retrospective at the Royal Academy for ages. It just keeps getting delayed and pushed back and nudged about, but this... well, this isn’t it either. Instead, this is something smaller and more intimate, but no less ‘OMG it’s Marina, I have to go immediately and put it on Instagram and also get a tattoo of it and scream MAAAAAARIIIINAAAAAAAAAA as I walk in crying and shaking and weeing myself’ from the biggest name in contemporary performance art.
Taking over both of Lisson Gallery’s London spaces, this video and sculpture show is dedicated to one of Abramović’s idols, the opera singer Maria Callas. Up in the Lisson Street gallery is an immersive video installation which finds our Marina being garrotted with a snake, exposing herself to radiation poisoning and being stabbed by Willem Dafoe in dramatic re-enactments of the opera singer’s on-stage demises, all paired with recordings of the Greek diva in full voice. It sounds almost unbearably silly but we’ll still all queue up and tell everyone we cried because we were so moved. That’s the power of Abramović.
The Cork Street gallery, meanwhile, will have alabaster sculptures exploring the same themes. Both exhibitions are timed to coincide with Abramović’s live-action opera project ‘Seven Deaths of Maria Callas’, which will be playing in Paris, Athens, Berlin and Naples over the coming months. Also, there are rumours of another autumn Marina exhibition at Colnaghi Gallery and performances across London, but that’s more excitement than one news post can realistically contain.
Marina Abramović: ‘Seven Deaths’, Sep 14-Oct 30. Lisson Gallery. Free. Details here.
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