ABOUT THE PROJECT

I have made a career as a performance artist for 40 years now and my relationship to the public is changing. It used to be very simple: the public was sitting in the audience and I was performing in front of them. Then, with my performance The Artist is Present, I created a one-to-one experience where the public was watching and only one person was actually experiencing. In 512 Hours, which I did at the Serpentine Galleries in London, the public were actually the ones performing and I just blended in.

In Sydney, for Marina Abramović: In Residence, I will be like a conductor in the exhibition space, but it will be the public who will take the physical and emotional journey. We constantly like to be entertained, to get things from outside. We never take time to get in touch with ourselves… our inner self. My function in this new kind of performance situation is to show you, through the Abramovic Method, what you can do for yourself. I wanted to make this big change because I understood that actually you can’t get any experience by me doing it for you… So I’m completely shifting the paradigm, changing the rules.

Marina Abramović