As she turns 80, Abramović brings performance art into one of the most sacred spaces of Western art history.
For over two centuries, the Gallerie dell’Accademia has narrated the story of art through oil and marble. That story is shifting this May, when Marina Abramović’s solo exhibition will infiltrate the museum’s permanent Renaissance galleries. Unprecedented in the museum’s canonical history, performance art will be presented as an equal to classical art.
Timed to the 61st Venice Biennale and her 80th birthday, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” is curated by Shai Baitel in close collaboration with Abramović. The exhibition, occupying temporary exhibition spaces along with the permanent galleries, will invite visitors to participate rather than observe.
“What if I made an absolutely interactive show where the audience is the focus?” she said. “They could not only understand what performance means, but take their own personal journey.”
The journey centers on what she calls “Transitory Objects” – stone beds and crystal-embedded structures activated through physical presence. When visitors lie down on, sit on, or stand inside them, they engage in what Abramović calls “energy transmission.”
These objects trace back to “The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk” (1988), one of the most ambitious performance works ever staged. Abramović and her former partner and collaborator, Ulay, began at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, walking for three months until they met in the middle to end their romantic relationship. The solitude and endurance of the journey revealed what she describes as a direct connection between the body and the mind.
Decades later, that audience-less act became the conceptual foundation for “Transforming Energy,” first realized as an immersive exhibition in Shanghai in 2025. The Transitory Objects translate the psychological and physical states of the walk into structures others can inhabit.
For Abramović, this physical commitment requires visitors to be present.
Presence, she insisted, is a discipline of surrendering distraction, silencing the impulse to document, and fully inhabiting the body. “The artwork is complete only when the audience connects themselves to it,” Abramović said.
New and older pieces from over three decades of her career will be on display, including “Rhythm 0” (1974) and “Carrying the Skeleton” (2008).
At the heart of the exhibition is a juxtaposition that collapses five centuries of art history: Abramović’s Pietà (with Ulay) (1983) paired with Titian’s unfinished Pietà (1575–76). Installed within the Accademia’s permanent Renaissance collection, the duo commemorates the 450th anniversary of Titian’s masterpiece.
Abramović called the pairing “an extreme honor,” its meaning intensified by Ulay’s recent death. In her photograph, she cradles his body for hours as she weeps. Titian’s painting, abandoned at his death, will hang nearby. The pairing frames the body as a site of loss, devotion, and transcendence.
It’s in Abramović’s nature to make history. Alongside her entry into the museum’s permanent galleries, she will also become the first living woman with a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia. She was also the first female artist to receive the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997.
Despite these milestones, Abramović rejects being perceived through a gendered lens. “I absolutely hate to connect gender to art,” she said. “The only measure I have is: is it good art or bad art?”
Venice itself is close to Abramovic’s heart. From then-communist Yugoslavia, she first visited at 14 with her mother. “The first time I saw the canals, the architecture, I started crying,” she said. “I never saw anything more beautiful, more romantic, more incredibly glamorous in my life.”
At age 80, her focus has shifted from testing physical limits to probing emotional and mental states. “In the beginning, I was interested in the body,” she said. “Now I’m much more interested in emotions and the mind.”
Presence is the key to the exhibition. “Just surrender to experience and follow instructions,” Abramović said. “If you give me your time, I will give you everything.”
Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy opens May 6 and runs until October 19 at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia. Marina Abramović portrait by Andrea Lazzari. Homepage banner image and inside image by Yu Jieyu.
