Why do we like watching women die, asks Marina Abramović in Copenhagen

‘You die many times in life,’ explains a televised Marina Abramović at the entrance to her latest exhibition, ‘and yet you continue living.’ It’s a fitting prologue for the show of an artist who has spent over half a century transforming the trials of her private life into art. In Seven Deaths at Copenhagen’s Cisternerne, the Belgrade-born artist looks to Maria Callas – and the tragic female characters she embodied – to interrogate the small deaths of heartbreak and ask how we endure when it feels impossible.

Abramović was just 14 when she first heard Callas’ obsidian voice slice through the speakers of her grandmother’s radio, a visceral introduction to a woman whose biography would serve as an inverted mirror to her own. ‘There was so much similarity,’ she told the New York Times in 2020. ‘We are Sagittarius, we had bad mothers. And then, also, this incredible intensity in the emotions, that she can be fragile, and strong at the same time.’ But while Abramović found salvation through her work, Callas was ultimately consumed by loss, and following a turbulent affair with Aristotle Onassis, her public unravelling saw the opera singer given over to grief. Though her official cause of death was a heart attack, the world indulged a more poetic truth; that the voice which had defeated every demanding score finally shattered under the weight of a broken heart.

It is a familiar story, the tragic feminine. One, which we tell again and again, both in opera and culture at large. Seven Deaths asks us to sit with this narrative, repeatedly, to examine our own impulses: Why do we like watching women die? Abramović’s work has long interrogated the female body as a stage for violence, and Seven Deaths is no exception. In the damp, cavernous space of Cisternerne – an abandoned, subterranean reservoir – seven films play in sequence, requiring the audience to roam between them in pitch black, toward the light and sound of the next screen.

From Tosca to Madame Butterfly, Abramović reimagines the demises of operatic female protagonists, with actor Willem Dafoe joining her in all but one, alternating between lover and executioner. ‘Love becomes hate, hate becomes love, and death becomes the ultimate release,’ Abramović warns before enacting a jilted bride, smashing mirrors and driving a glass vase into her chest until blood blooms across the white lace. In other scenes, she is choked by the thick, winding body of a golden python; she launches herself from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper; she exposes herself to radiation, collapsing dramatically as Callas’ voice soars.

By adding a twist to each ending, Abramović complicates the trope of the heroine as victim. In the final film, a re-imagining of Bellini’s Norma, Callas’s most-performed role, Abramović dons a deconstructed tuxedo while Dafoe wears a gold-sequined gown. By adopting the masculine dress of the warrior, she takes command of the narrative; moved by her immense bravery, the General in the gown recognises his own cowardice and chooses to join her. They walk hand-in-hand into the flames as equals, their eyes rolling back shared rapture.

Snakes, knives, and fire are familiar elements of the Abramović canon, props she’s used to test her endurance in the same way Callas stretched her voice. Whether surrounded by a flaming five-pointed star in Rhythm 5 (1974) or testing her mental endurance with knives in Rhythm 10 (1973), Abramović has always used her body as a site for transcendence. Her career has been built at the limits, eschewing subtlety in favour of extremes. It is hardly surprising, then, that the artist is not a naturalistic actor; her expressions here can feel heavy, overwrought. It leads me to wonder if Abramović is really playing these roles at all, or simply inhabiting those same extreme states that she has worked through for decades.

Beyond their superficial similarities - a shared sharp profile and severe black hair - this embodied honesty is where Maria and Marina are most tightly bound. When Callas sang Vissi d’arte (‘I lived for art’) she meant it. When Abramović declares in the first film, ‘I go forever,’ she believes it. The final day of Seven Deaths, 30 November 2026, marks Abromavić’s 80th birthday. She will enter her ninth decade not only as a master of endurance, but also as the first living female artist to present a solo show at Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia. The small deaths of a life are inevitable, but for Abramović, an unwavering devotion to art ensures that the show always goes on.

Marina Abramović, Seven Deaths at Cisternerne, Copenhagen, until 30 November

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