Marina Abramović built her career by testing the limits of the body. Now, she’s testing what digital art can do. On this episode of The Artsy Podcast, the groundbreaking performance artist joins us for a conversation about launching her new NFT project, bringing mindfulness to the digital realm, and using her work to reach across generational divides.
Plus, Artsy editors Casey Lesser and Arun Kakar break down everything you need to know about Frieze Week in New York—a period packed with art fairs, gallery openings, and can’t-miss museum shows. Listen now, and read an edited excerpt of the conversation with Abramović below.
This episode was recorded by Alex Kenning, produced by Olivia Horn and Grant Irving, and edited by Grant Irving.
Arun Kakar: You’ve described your NFT project as a way of connecting with the public. How did you first arrive at this idea?
Marina Abramović: First of all, I started as a painter. And the painter is very lonely, because you’re inside the studio, you paint, then the painting leaves the studio, goes to the gallery. You hang the painting in the gallery and then there is not anything to do with the public. The public, for you, doesn’t exist, because people come to see the work hang on the wall.
But the first time I found the medium of performance, that was such a strong moment in my life that I felt electricity through my entire being. I knew that it was so much more intense and interesting. I could not ever go back to the studio and make normal paintings, which I never actually did. And I stopped painting when I was in my early twenties.
The nature of performance is immaterial, you know, you have to be there to experience it. And what you can do with this immateriality is actually reach people’s emotions. One thing that I connect with, from the very early time of my performance, is the young public. My public is 14 years old, 15, 16, 17—extremely young. And when you see this young public, they all have an addiction to technology and to the digital world. But there’s something immaterial, something emotional in my work to attract them.
But I was thinking, how can I even get closer to this audience? How can I create something in their own digital world, to give them a kind of meditative state of mind? I wanted to show them there’s also other ways. I wanted them to know what it means to be silent; what it means to do absolutely nothing; what it means to be present. So that was one really attractive reason for me to get into this world.
A.K.: It’s fascinating, the convergence between your life, the digital realm, and also the spiritual aspect of it. How do you kind of see those forces working together in this project?
M.A.: Absolutely in harmony. I’m so interested in the idea of an avatar. Avatars have kind of supernatural powers, which normal people don’t. And my work really was dealing, all my life, with the limits of the human body—how far it can go without being killed, or how far consciousness can go. Endurance, long durational work, and so on.
But still, me, as a human being—I still can’t fly. I can’t walk on the fire. I can’t levitate. All of this stuff my avatar can do. I have now this kind of super avatar of myself that can do all of this and just also play. Something with the digital world that’s incredibly important is the act of playing.
Marina Abramović is perhaps the most famous performance artist working today. Employing duration, pain, danger, exhaustion, and viewer participation, she works at extremes and complicates the relationship between art and audience. Abramović exhibited at Documenta in 1977, 1982, and 1992, and at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1997, when she was awarded the Golden Lion. In her famous 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” visitors sat across from Abramović in silent communion. More recently, she became the first woman artist to stage a solo exhibition in the Royal Academy’s main galleries in the institution’s 255-year history. Abramović is the founder of the Marina Abramović Institute, which promotes performance art globally.
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Header and thumbnail: Portrait of Marina Abramović by Dow Wasiksiri, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
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