MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

ALBERTINA MODERN, VIENNA

Marina Abramović (born 1946 in Belgrade) is one of the most eminent contemporary artists. Considered the founder of modern performance art, she has written art history with her legendary appearances. From her beginnings in the Belgrade of the 1970s, she has, over the course of a career spanning more than fifty years, firmly established performance as a genre of visual art. Already in 1978, she had her first appearance in Vienna at the International Performance Festival. The exhibition, curated in cooperation with Kunstforum Wien, will offer a comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition offers several stations where visitors are invited to slip into the role of performers. Performance art has a long tradition in Vienna, with Actionism as its best-known manifestation.

Marina Abramović’s early performance series Rhythm combined concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. Already it was about time, silence, energy, and the heightened awareness evoked by long-duration performances—themes that run through Abramović’s entire oeuvre. To her, the body was both subject and medium. By exposing herself to pain, total exhaustion, and danger, she kept pushing her physical and psychological limits, always in quest of emotional and spiritual transformation.

From 1976 to 1988, she performed together with her life partner Ulay (1943–2020). Since then, she has created solo works that involve more interaction with the audience, objects that invite participation, and performances such as The Artist Is Present, in which she gave visitors an opportunity to take turns sitting across from her at a table for one minute of silence each, eight hours a day for almost three months at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010. This performance finally made her known to a wide public.

For the retrospective, the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien will, in a collaborative exhibition design created with the artist, set up rooms that are each dedicated to a specific theme such as participation, communism, body limits, energy from nature, or enlightenment. Exhibits on display there will include early works created in Belgrade, the first solo performances, her collaboration with Ulay and the legendary joint performances, the participation-inviting Transitory Objects for Human Use, which marked the beginning of her second solo career, the spectacular Balkan Baroqueperformance, for which she received a Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, as well as more recent video and sculptural works. In addition, her installation Four Crosses (2019) will be shown.

The exhibition is a cooperation between the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthaus Zürich, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna. It is created in close collaboration with the artist.

The ALBERTINA MODERN, in cooperation with the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, is presenting the first major retrospective of Marina Abramović in Austria. The exhibition is organized by the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in cooperation with the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna.

The exhibition will be on display at the ALBERTINA MODERN from 10 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.

REGULAR OPENING HOURS
Daily | 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Last admission | 5 p.m.

Admission | 17.90 EUR

EXHIBITION PROGRAM
Exclusive special opening
Saturday to Tuesday | 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
October & November
25 EUR | person

Discover the exhibition outside the regular opening hours with guaranteed admission and no long waiting time during your chosen time slot.
Book time slot

Public guided tours (in German) | SOLD OUT
We recommend visiting the exhibition with our smartphone guide.

Buy now

Perfomance Artists:

Alexandra Cassirer
Denisa Musilova
Gabriel Jose Zuñiga Avila
Grischka Voss
Hayun Kim
Jolyane Langlois
Katharina Senk
Lukas Hanus
Miquel Amengual Gual
Simone Lorenzo Benini
Steffi Wieser
Vittorio Porcelli

Curator of the Exhibition:

Bettina M. Busse, MA