With a thousand strangers and Marina Abramović, I breathe in. Out. In again.
The world’s most famous — and most controversial — performance artiste sits on stage watching us, dressed in flowing white, her Rapunzel hair falling over one shoulder, her nails painted blood red. “I always ask for the most uncomfortable chair,” she said earlier, gliding onto the stage. “It keeps me alert.”
The room is silent. “Breathe in,” she says, with the calm authority of someone who has spent decades testing the limits of her own body. “Breathe out.” Again and again. Twelve times in all.
My mind is racing. We are at the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2026 to listen to Marina talk about the history of performance art. The artiste, now 79, has built a career on endurance — her own, and sometimes ours.
At the talk, which is based on many, many video clips, there are moments when I, along with other members of the audience beside me, cover our eyes or look away. “When you start performance you are like a child walking in unknown territory. First I had to find what the limits are of my physical body,” says Marina. She adds, “Suffering. Mortality. Fear of pain. These are the three things people are afraid of. Every kind of art deals with this. I want to show the public, I am the mirror. If I can do this, causing pain to get free from the pain, you can do it yourself.”
She continues, “Art has so much more to do these days, especially in the society we are living in… I don’t believe that art can change the world, but art can point to problems, and can ask the right questions.” She adds, “Being an artiste is to be able to sacrifice everything. And it is a very lonely life.”
Just an hour earlier, at the press conference, a visibly nervous young performance artiste, her face thick with white powder, accused Marina of being in the Epstein files. The room stilled with tension.
Marina looked at her with calm curiosity. “Are you talking about eating children?”
The young artiste’s hands were shaking so much she had to steady the microphone with both. “I am talking about art as a medium of control,” she said. “Why do you let people control you? You are an artiste, not a satanist.”
With the composure of someone long accustomed to controversy, Marina replied, “You make a lot of mistakes in accusing me… It is so dangerous for me. And there is no truth in this.”
She went on to explain how her Spirit Cooking dinner performance poetry was misread as satanic ritual, then woven together with Lady Gaga’s visit to her show at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) into a conspiracy theory fuelled by rumour and misinformation.
Marina Abramović
| Photo Credit:
Gayatri Nair
This is, after all, the artiste who once stood motionless for six hours while strangers cut her skin and aimed a loaded gun at her head; who passed out inside a burning five-pointed star; who spent four days scrubbing blood-soaked cow bones at the Venice Biennale.
You expect intensity. Hers is a languid, self-confident kind. She leans back and beams. “I am here now. With you. The only thing we have in life is presence. I teach presence.”
She looks around as the audience trips over itself to ask increasingly intellectual questions. “Any funny questions here?” she asks. “I love telling jokes. I didn’t hear any Indian jokes.”
In a biennale rich in performance art, thanks to curator, Nikhil Chopra, Marina is the crowning glory.
At the Island Warehouse close by, her massive video installation features 108 Tibetan monks and nuns chanting the heart sutra. In the muggy Kochi heat, the chants wash over you. “It took me five years. When I heard different monasteries and different traditions together, it was like a waterfall,” says Marina.
Though her two-hour talk, which drew artists, collectors and fans from across the country was a comprehensive class on performance art, Marina is most fascinating when she goes off script. The highlights of the evening are the pieces she shows with her long time partner and collaborator, German performance artiste Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen).
As she plays the clip of the two of them screaming into each other’s mouths, the sound goes off. “Oh my God. The sound is very important,” she says, adding, “I can scream now, but I don’t want to.” Then, she screams. As the audience sits up in surprise, she chuckles, “That is enough.” Another clip comes up of her and Ulay performing Imponderabilia at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. “I am sorry we are naked,” she shrugs, “But this was the Seventies.”
Earlier that evening, discussing her quest to come to terms with pain she had said, “Physical pain is easy to understand and feel. Emotional pain I’m not even close. Emotions are so difficult.” It makes it easier to understand why her now-viral performance at MoMA, in 2010, The Artist Is Present had as much impact on her as it did the audience.
“I watched 1,560 eyes. People were waiting for hours, sleeping outside the museum to see me. I was 65 years old then, and I could never have done this when I was younger. I did not have the wisdom, or the concentration.” Ulay famously sat across her during this performance. “After three months I stood up from that chair, and I knew I was different.”
Discussing the importance of teaching, Marina says “Performance is a living form of art. For it to be a living form of art it must be preserved.” Hence her Marina Abramović Institute in Greece, which is predictably severe. “We take your telephone, computer and watch for one week. We give you only water and tea, with a touch of honey. No food. We make you count grains of rice for hours and hours so you really understand time and concentration,” she says.
“It’s really important that you are fragile and strong. This is the most difficult form of art. It is all about emotion. Art has to touch you in the stomach and the heart.”
It is also what keeps her going. “I am turning 80 this year. I have shows booked till 2032. I am absolutely not stopping… I don’t know where this energy comes from. Making art is as strong as breathing. If you stop breathing, you die. If you look at my generation, half started repeating themselves, half stopped breathing.”
