MARINA
ABRAMOVIĆ

Following the success of Marina Abramović’s ambitious work Luminosity, 1997, in 13 Rooms, John Kaldor invited the pioneering Serbian performance artist to Sydney for a solo project. Two years later, at the historic Pier 2/3 in the Walsh Bay artistic precinct, Marina Abramović: In Residence offered audiences an innovative experience at the forefront of contemporary art.

Abramović is one of the world’s pre-eminent performance artists, with a practice spanning four decades. She was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and named one of Time Magazine’s one hundred most influential people in 2014.

Abramović studied fine arts in Belgrade, before immigrating to Amsterdam, where she continued to develop her practice. Reflecting her childhood fascination with ritual, Abramović’s early Rhythm series of performances pushed the limits of physical and emotional endurance. In 1976, Abramović began her decade-long collaboration with German performance artist Ulay, creating some of her most famous works, such as Relation in Time, 1977, which saw them sit back to back for sixteen hours, tied together by their ponytails.

In The Artist is Present, 2010, her major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Abramović sat opposite 1,545 visitors, with more than 850,000 spectators, in a powerful performance of endurance over twenty weeks.

As Abramović wrote in her artist’s statement for In Residence, “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”. Now, Abramović proposed, “I will be like a conductor in the exhibition space, but it will be the public who will take the physical and emotional journey… My function in this new kind of performance situation is to show you, through the Abramović Method, what you can do for yourself”.

Within view of the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge, Pier 2/3 became a pop-up venue, housing Abramović’s extraordinary project, along with a series of public talks and special events, and a live-in artists’ residency program. For the duration of the project, twelve Australian artists lived and worked upstairs at the Pier, where they were mentored by Abramović and leading international performance experts, and engaged with the public in the context of a working studio.

The artist described her audience as the “living material” of the work. Across twelve days, an audience of over 31,000 visited the Pier, with many staying for hours at a time, to participate in Abramović’s durational and meditative exercises. Abramović and her team were present on-site each day, guiding participants through an experience designed to shift their focus, challenge their preconceptions and change the way they look at art.