A major retrospective tracing the prolific career of performance artist Marina Abramovich will go on show at Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture from 8 October to 4 December 2011. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, the exhibition features approximately 50 works spanning more than four decades of her early interventions, sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances.
Internationally recognized as a pioneer of performance art, Abramovich has been testing the boundaries of performance for over 30 years, presenting work that physically and mentally challenges the performer and the viewer. Since the beginning of Abramovi?’s career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, the body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. This retrospective will introduce Abramovi?, widely acclaimed for the importance of her contribution to the history of performance art, to a Russian audience. In so doing, it follows in the footsteps of worldwide exhibitions of Abramovi?’s oeuvre such as Balkan Baroque, presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Seven Easy Pieces at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005), and in Marina Abramovich: The Artist Is Present at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010).