Marina Abramović to stage the first major exhibition by a woman at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice

The idea first came about when Baitel, who has known Abramović for 17 years, met up with her in New York in 2021. Back then, Baitel had just been appointed as the new director of MAM. “She told me how much she wanted to have an exhibition in China again and how the decades had passed since the walk on the Great Wall of China,” he says. Despite numerous attempts, Abramović faced administrative barriers that delayed or rejected proposals. The two began to conceive a concept that the artist defined as “bulletproof”: one that could easily be approved by the government and received by the audience in exactly the way she would like her ideas and philosophies to be communicated.

The Lovers, similarly, had been rejected, delayed, and questioned by the authorities before its final approval, as it was very rare for any art to take place at the Great Wall of China, let alone a piece that was supposed to be a wedding. With Transforming Energy, she says, “I don’t need to show my performance art. I don’t need to show anything that might offend Chinese society, like nudity, which my work is full of. What if I show my method and make an interactive show where the audience is the focus, so that they not only understand what performance means but also take their own personal journey? This is exactly what we did.”

“What we really wanted to give the audience is the energy and everything that Marina has felt and remembered during the walk of the Great Wall,” says Baitel. In Shanghai, the setup featured crystal objects sculpted from about 3,000 kilograms of minerals sourced from various countries. Visitors were asked to disengage from their phones. “The structure is a setup for the crystals, and the crystals are a setup for the energy—which is the most important takeaway,” Baitel notes.

Abramović adds, “Performance is the energy between the audience and the performer. This energy is something immaterial and invisible but deeply emotional. To transfer this feeling to the audience is the essence of the show.”

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The Shanghai reception was enthusiastic, especially among younger audiences. Abramović was impressed by how young Chinese visitors not only knew of her work through platforms such as TikTok and Instagram but also understood it. “They even participated in the more difficult exercises,” she says, “like Opening and Closing the Door, where they had to slowly open a metal door without exiting, then slowly close it without entering, for three hours.”

The Venice show will be bigger in scale and greater in impact. “Marina, through the years, has fully honed the ability to allow the audience to completely connect with their body and mind into what she describes as a transformative experience,” says Baitel.

Venice also represents a full-circle moment for Abramović. The Serbia-born artist first visited Venice when she was 14 years old, accompanying her mother, an influential figure in the Yugoslav Communist government after World War II, who was on a work trip to the Italian city. “We took the train from Belgrade to Venice—a pretty long trip. When we arrived, I got off the train and I looked at Venice for the first time. I saw canals and the architecture. I started crying. My mother said, ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Nothing is wrong. It’s just so beautiful that it made me cry. Where I come from, I had never seen anything more beautiful, more romantic, more incredibly glamorous in my life.’”

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More importantly, Venice marked her early exposure to the art world. She recalls seeing sculptor Louise Nevelson’s showcase at the US Pavilion in 1962 and pop artist Robert Rauschenberg’s in 1964—Rauschenberg also won the Grand Prize that year, marking the US’s ascendance over European artistic dominance. “For the first time, I was confronted with this kind of art that I had never seen before. So this was really an incredible learning process,” she says.

She would continue attending subsequent biennales, eventually participating herself. In 1975, she and Ulay presented Relation in Space, in which the two, naked, repeatedly collided for an hour—exploring the merging of male and female energies. In 1997, she became the first female artist to win the Golden Lion for Balkan Baroque, where she spent four days washing a pile of bloody cow bones while singing Balkan folk songs—a haunting response to the Yugoslav wars (1991 to 2001).

“I remember tangoing into the middle of St Mark’s Square with incredible happiness and joy. I was 50 years old and I was having this unbelievable honour,” she says. “Coming back to Venice now, I’ll be the first woman ever to enter the Gallerie dell’Accademia. To have conversations with Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Botticelli and all these masters is a huge honour.”

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When asked whether placing her work alongside Renaissance icons—putting her Pietà (with Ulay) (1983) next to Titian’s Pietà (c.1575–76), for instance—might challenge traditional perceptions of gender in art, Abramović is firm. “I’m not a feminist. I absolutely hate to connect gender to art. I think art should not have any gender. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman or man, or African American or gay, or belong to any of the genders we invent [or racial backgrounds]. The only measure I have about art is whether it’s good art or bad art.”

Still, she acknowledges the historical challenges women face in the art world. “Female artists never had the same value, the same exposure, the same prices on the market. That’s a fact,” she says. “But I don’t want to create negative energy in my work. I want to create in the best way possible and deliver what I deliver, and history and society will decide its place.”

Abramović sees the Venice exhibition as part of a broader legacy. “I’m the first woman to have [a major solo show in 2003 at the main galleries of] the Royal Academy of Arts in London after 255 years. Now, this Venice show isn’t just happening in the contemporary but also the classic section,” she says. “So I feel like a bulldozer. I’m trying to create this new path with all these wonderful, talented women behind me.”

Nearing 80, Abramović remains formidable—unyielding in spirit and vision.

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