Marina Abramović Retrospective at Royal Academy of Arts London in 2023

The Royal Academy of Arts in London has rescheduled its major retrospective of Marina Abramović (born 1946, Belgrade) for 2023, after the original September 2020 opening was canceled due to the pandemic. The exhibition will run from September 23 to December 10, 2023, and will be the largest ever dedicated to the artist in the United Kingdom. It will survey five decades of her life and career, featuring both historical works and new pieces created specifically for the Royal Academy. The show will include the iconic performance Imponderabilia, originally staged in 1977 with her former partner Ulay at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna during the International Performance Week. In that piece, the two artists stood naked facing each other in the museum doorway, forcing visitors to squeeze between them. The performance was interrupted by police after three hours instead of the planned six. Other highlights include Rhythm 0 (1974), where the public was invited to interact freely with the artist's immobile body, and The Artist Is Present (2010) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which Abramović silently held the gaze of countless sitters, including Ulay. The London retrospective will also feature live performers trained by Abramović to reenact her works, similar to the traveling exhibition The Cleaner, which has been shown at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and the CoCA in Toruń, Poland.