INSIDE ABRAMOVIĆ’S STRATEGY. ICONOGRAPHY FIRST, THEN VENICE

Before the floor plan, before the wall texts, there was the portrait. Marina Abramović, photographed by Szilveszter Makó for M Revista de Milenio (M Milenio), editorially staged and fully credited down to a “Total look: PRADA,” began circulating online like a curatorial paratext, a portable label for an exhibition not yet installed. Shot in New York, the image does what Venice has always demanded of its protagonists. It manufactures authority in advance and dares the institution to match it.

Read that way, the spread isn’t decoration around Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy (Gallerie dell’Accademia, May 6–October 19, 2026). It’s part of the apparatus. It frames the show as a shift in display logic: from viewing to consenting, from objects to conditions, from museum time to bodily time, with the visitor cast as medium, not spectator. Fashion here isn’t an accessory. It’s a visibility strategy that makes one quiet, unapologetic claim: Abramović won’t “enter” the Accademia. She will recalibrate it.

That recalibration became legible at 10 a.m., during a virtual press conference that opened with small human choreography, matching outfits, a “tangerine from the Mediterranean,” a muted microphone. What sounded like logistics was, in fact, method. And it explained why this Venice chapter reads less like a celebratory return than a carefully engineered takeover of attention.

A VENICE SHOW THAT STARTED FROM CHINA

Curator Shai Baitel, introduced as artistic director of the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, traced the exhibition’s origin to the height of the pandemic: a crowded New York restaurant, in the first weeks people returned to public life without social distancing. Abramović told him she’d wanted to stage an exhibition in China for decades. She also laid out the reality: six, seven, perhaps eight attempts had been delayed or rejected when submitted for approval.

So the concept had to be, in Baitel’s word, “bulletproof.” Abramović put it bluntly: she didn’t need to show performance works that might “offend” Chinese society, nudity included. Instead, she would show her method. The audience would become the focus, and the artwork would be complete only through participation.

It’s a quietly radical admission. What arrives in Venice, in other words, isn’t only a celebration. It’s a format born from friction with power. 

THE ACCADEMIA AS A THRESHOLD, NOT A VENUE

In Venice, that format doesn’t land in a neutral white cube. The Gallerie dell’Accademia is a museum where the body has been represented, idealized, and sanctified for centuries. The institution is billing Transforming Energy as its first major exhibition dedicated to a living woman artist and, crucially, it won’t remain confined to temporary galleries. As Baitel explained, works will enter rooms of the permanent collection, creating a dialogue with Renaissance masterpieces.

The timing locks into the city’s larger atmosphere. Venice will already be in its Biennale “threshold” week when Abramović opens on May 6, three days before the 61st Biennale Arte opens to the public on May 9 (with pre-opening May 6–8). The Biennale, for its part, has stated that the 2026 edition, In Minor Keys, will be realized following the project conceived and defined by Koyo Kouoh, with an explicit intention to preserve and disseminate her ideas. 

Abramović framed her own continuity as lived biography. She recalled arriving in Venice at 14, traveling by train from Belgrade with her mother, a museum director, stepping out to canals and architecture for the first time and crying “unconditionally,” because beauty made her cry. She recalled her first confrontation with American art at the Biennale, and then her first performance invitation in 1975: Relation in Space (with Ulay), two naked bodies moving and colliding for an entire hour. 

These aren’t nostalgia beats. They’re scaffolding for a claim: Venice isn’t simply where she exhibits. It’s where she learned how art becomes a public language.

PIETÀ VERSUS PIETÀ, AND THE HIGH STAKES OF PAIRING

One of the exhibition’s central moves is the pairing of Titian’s unfinished Pietà with Abramović’s Pietà (with Ulay) (1983). The impetus came from the museum itself, Baitel said. In 2026, it marks 450 years since Titian’s death, and the Accademia wanted to note the anniversary with a contemporary dialogue.

Abramović’s account of her own work was strikingly physical. She described herself dressed in red, Ulay in white, holding him. She held the pose for roughly three hours before the photograph was taken. During the hold, she said, she felt feverish and unwell, and tears rose in her eyes because of her physical state.

Then came a detail that shifts the image from icon to biology, from devotion to creation. In Indian and Chinese philosophy, she said, white and red represent the beginning of the world: the red drop of menstrual blood and the white drop of sperm. That, she explained, is why the two colors were chosen.

There was a darker layer, too. Ulay died, she noted, and she suggested the work now reads as a kind of prediction. “Some artists could actually also in the work have prediction of the future,” she said.

Pairing Titian’s last, unresolved grief with a contemporary image that carries love, ritual, and a retrospectively funerary charge isn’t a clever curatorial trick. It’s a wager on what a museum can bear.

WHAT “ENERGY” MEANS HERE, AND WHY THE PHONE BAN MATTERS

If Transforming Energy has a thesis, it isn’t “Marina Abramović is important.” It’s that presence is scarce, and museums can become laboratories for reclaiming it.

At the core is a set of interactive Transitory Objects, described in project materials as stone structures, including beds, embedded with crystals, meant to be activated by sitting, lying, or standing, in what Abramović calls a transmission of energy. Abramović insisted on language in the press conference: they are not sculptures. They are “transitory” because you experience the moment, and the object, she said, is “not necessary anymore.”

Baitel translated the idea into a three-part hierarchy: the structure is a setup for the minerals, the minerals are a setup for the energy, and the energy is the real takeaway. Abramović framed it as a refusal of compromise, not an avoidance strategy. "Performance is energy between performer and audience, immaterial, invisible, but deeply emotional." The point was to transfer that feeling.

In Shanghai, they added a rule that still lands like provocation: visitors had to “bend the telephone,” a detox from technology. Baitel called it “unheard of in China,” where technology is “part of their body.” Abramović reinforced the logic in Venice terms: arrive with an open mind, a willing soul, no telephone. Pocket your watch. Don’t calculate time. Surrender to the experience. Follow instructions. “I’m giving you experience if you give me time,” she said. “If you don’t give me time, I can’t give you anything.”

This is where the exhibition stops reading like spiritual décor and becomes an ethical demand. It asks for consent, not only to participate, but to be changed by an encounter you can’t scroll past.

THE SHANGHAI REHEARSAL, THE DISCIPLINE OF STRANGERS, AND THE MYTH OF THE LEGEND

The press conference made clear just how carefully the Shanghai presentation was built. Baitel described a first section offering historical background: Abramović’s communist upbringing, her parents, what she read, what ideologies she absorbed, and how she became the artist she is. He described discovering a “treasure” of more than 3,000 images from The Great Wall Walk, never presented before, shown so audiences could understand what the show was built on.

Then came existing Transitory Objects from the past three decades, organized around positions of the body, lying, sitting, standing. Finally, a third zone Baitel called the “spa”: new Transitory Objects created for China and now traveling to Venice, larger in scale and ambition.

Abramović’s most telling anecdote wasn’t about fame. It was about time as discipline. She described a work with five metal doors. The instruction: stand in front of a door, slowly open it, but do not exit; then slowly close it, but do not enter. Repeat for three hours. People did it, she said. In her view, that willingness to submit to duration is something Western audiences increasingly lack.

Baitel added that Shanghai revealed Abramović has a large fan base in China. There were lines around the museum, and even longer waits for the third part of the exhibition, because visitors could stay as long as they wanted. Abramović noted her biography, Walking Through Walls, was translated into Mandarin, and she refused to call visitors “the public.” They were “friends.” The show wasn’t made to be watched. It was made to be inhabited.

THE MYTH PIECES RETURN, AND THE MUSEUM BECOMES THE MIRROR

The Venice project isn’t limited to Transitory Objects. Materials list a constellation of canonical works: Rhythm 0 (1974), Imponderabilia (1977), Light/Dark (1977), Balkan Baroque (1997), Carrying the Skeleton (2008), alongside projections of historic performances and new creations made for the occasion. Baitel confirmed that, compared with Shanghai, Venice is adding artworks from Abramović’s history, including performance pieces and videos, to offer a fuller story.

This is where the Accademia context shifts from prestigious to dangerous. In a museum built for contemplation, Rhythm 0 changes its charge. The work is often reduced to the mythology of its premise: a table of objects, a body offered to the public’s will, a social experiment that still makes people flinch. Placed amid centuries of painted bodies, the question sharpens. It’s no longer only “what did Abramović do.” It becomes: what do we do when permission is given?

And Balkan Baroque, already tied to Venice through the Golden Lion of 1997, returns with an additional layer: time. A work about war memory and bodily endurance now sits inside a city that sells beauty as commodity, and inside a year when the artist herself is turning 80. The museum becomes a mirror, not for the past, but for the kind of spectator we’ve become.

GENDER, THE “BULLDOZER,” AND A REFUSAL TO BE PACKAGED

Asked whether this historic placement might change conversations about gender in classical art spaces, Abramović refused the expected frame. “I’m female. I’m not feminist,” she said, adding that she “hate[s]” tying gender to art. Art, in her view, should be judged as good or bad, not filtered through identity categories.

And yet she didn’t deny structural inequity. She acknowledged that, historically, women artists have not been granted equal value, exposure, or market recognition. She simply refused to build her practice on resentment. “You spend entire life complaining,” she said. “All what I actually do is to work.”

Then, almost against her own argument, she offered the sentence that will follow her through Venice: “I feel like a bulldozer.” Not as a slogan, but as a description of how institutions change, one refusal at a time, and how a path opens for “wonderful, talented women behind me.”

THE MOST REVEALING LINE, AND WHAT IT PREDICTS ABOUT VENICE

Near the end of the press conference, Abramović widened the argument beyond art. If we don’t take control of our lives, she warned, technology will take it for us. Artificial intelligence is developing so fast that we risk losing control, she said, science fiction turning real, humans run by machines.

It’s easy to dismiss statements like that as grand, until you place them inside a show that begins by confiscating your phone.

Abramović also described a project presented to leaders in Davos: a bus covered with curtains, where visitors spend 30 minutes making an internal journey, traveling nowhere, decompressing from technology. Leaders, she implied, “need this lesson badly right now.” In another aside, she mentioned leading seven minutes of complete silence for 250,000 people at Glastonbury, as proof that a mass audience can still be asked to listen.

This is what Venice will expose. Transforming Energy isn’t only a retrospective glow. It’s a proposal for a new kind of public, a “performative public,” as Abramović called it, one that returns again and again because the experience isn’t consumable. It’s cumulative.