If you were to have stepped foot in Elephant and Castle’s Corsica Studios in the early part of 2024, you’ll have been greeted with a curious sight: a side room tucked away from the intoxicating noise where a funeral for a human-sized, furry yeti was taking place. Fast-forward six months and take a hop across the river to London’s ICA, where more strange scenes were afoot; a giant spectral moth hovering over a stage decorated with papier-mâché bones. In other venues, at other times, there have been demon dogs with mechanical jaws and oversized, haunted faces peering quietly over a crowd that has steadily escalated as word of this unusual band has spread. This is the world of Mary In The Junkyard: south London’s most creative young trio, and a group increasingly charming the art world as much as the music one.

Formed of vocalist, guitarist and chief prop-maker Clari Freeman-Taylor, bassist and cellist Saya Barbaglia, and drummer David Addison, Mary In The Junkyard make the kind of fantastical, textural music that builds worlds. More than that, however, the trio have spent time translating these stories into something tangible around them. 'Having tactile, handmade art – things people can really touch and connect with – feels important to a show experience when quite a lot of things right now are trying to be really cool and clean and minimalist,' says Barbaglia.

'It expands the scope of the music,' Addison agrees. 'Having the visual side deepens the experience.'

It’s an innately exploratory mindset that, recently, has led the band into a high-profile new circle. Heading out to New York to work on their forthcoming debut album, Role Model Hermit, to be released in July, the group found themselves talking to film producer and virtual reality artist Todd Eckert after he attended one of their gigs. With the band having nowhere to stay in the city, Eckert – a fan – offered them a place to crash and a studio space to work from in the home he shares with his partner, Marina Abramović. Later in the week, the trio played a private gig for Eckert, Abramović and a group of their peers. 'Marina said I should get a Britney mic because the microphone was too obstructive,' notes Freeman-Taylor of the unlikely evening.

Though Abramović’s name still brings up a certain amount of reverie ('She’s amazing, I love her work,' the vocalist smiles), the group have now become firm friends with the legendary performance artist. 'Todd and Marina are like our New York parents,' Barbaglia says. Freeman-Taylor laughs as she remembers one interaction: ‘Marina was like, “Oh, there are three of you, what do we do in the divorce? I’m a communist, I can’t share, so I’m going to have to cut you in half.”’

You can understand why Abramović and Eckert might have taken a shine to Mary In The Junkyard. In a musical landscape dominated by conversations around nepotism and privilege, the trio are resolutely DIY-spirited and have crafted their entire vision themselves. 'It’s an amazing feeling to have something in your head and to be able to make it exist an actual thing that’s real,’ says Freeman-Taylor.

None of the band are trained artists but they’ve turned their inner circle into its own makeshift art school. The three band members all live within a couple of doors of each other, and their communal rooftop has become a hub for creativity and play. Here, you’ll find the trio and their friends building creatures for their shows, and testing out all manner of new hobbies – pole dancing, martial arts, breakdancing – that often end up in the overall Mary mix too. 'We’re very curious people and that comes into the visual world as well,' says Barbaglia. Freeman-Taylor nods: 'We’re very playful together, and that comes into our songwriting but also the things on stage with us.'

In the video for their crepuscular single ‘New Muscles’, this spirit is out in full force. The plot resurrects the ‘beetroot heart’ of the aforementioned yeti, turning it into a symbol of strength and fortitude that Addison digs up from the ground as his two bandmates grapple in a convincing bout of boxing. It’s unsettling and strangely beautiful; a world away from the classic trope of skinny jean-clad indie bands standing against a wall, looking aloof. But that’s a large part of the point. 'Rock music and indie music are in a bit of a weird period. The first part of the 2020s had its own sound and its own vibe, whereas now, there’s lots of room to play around with the idea of what a rock band should be,' suggests Addison.

Freeman-Taylor is the dreamy, imaginative lynchpin of the Junkyard’s hyper-creative universe. When pressed, she can summon up a few core influences to her artistry – Paul Klee’s hand puppets, and the 'magical landscapes' of Leonora Carrington’s paintings. But the vocalist mainly talks about 'instinct' and how the characters and visuals of Mary In The Junkyard are more like a bridge between fantasy and reality.

For their previous releases, she’s painted all the artwork – a wild, wind-whipped woman for 2025 single ‘Midori’ or a swirling vortex of moths and lanterns for the year before’s ‘Ghost’. For the Role Model Hermit album, however, the photograph was a collaboration with creative director Daisy Ayscough and features the singer in full prosthetics, decked out to embody the character in the song ‘Mouse’. 'I was remembering a past life that I had when I was a fisherman and my best friend was a mouse. The song’s about meeting the mouse now when we’ve both been reincarnated into people,' she says. 'I think about past lives all the time. Imagination just comes from instinct; everything that I imagine is more just my instinct of what I know is true.'

It’s a statement that seems core to Mary In The Junkyard’s outlook as a whole. There’s a remarkable lack of cynicism that comes through in everything they say, from the gut feeling that ‘things would figure themselves out’ in New York (they did) to the way they talk about clothes and dressing for the stage as a 'free, non-judgemental space'. 'You’re there playing music, you’re not there walking a fashion show, so whatever you wear – whether it’s weird or cool – it doesn’t really matter because it can all just feed into the performance,' says Barbaglia. 'You can wear literally anything.' One time, she remembers with a laugh, buying moon costumes to wear for their show in El Paso. 'I had white-face and I looked more like an anaemic banana,' she deadpans.

In a world of TikTok trends and doing anything for the dopamine hit of Instagram acceptance, seeing a young band cast that external gaze aside and follow the path of fun feels like rebellion. When they talk about the way that the world of Mary In The Junkyard could expand, there’s a limitlessness to their imagination that seems only tempered by cash flow (and pesky health and safety rules). 'I’m excited about projections and using light. And, because we’re so interested in movement-based art, that’ll probably be something that’ll find its way into our shows,' Freeman-Taylor enthuses before addressing Barbaglia: 'We could have ropes that lift us into the air. Imagine if we both had Britney mics and we were both hanging from the ceiling?!' With Mary In The Junkyard, then, the sky truly is the limit.

‘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

frederiksbergmuseerne.dk

The Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, who, over the course of her career has pushed herself and her body to extremes, calls her latest work – Balkan Erotic Epic – her most ambitious yet. Part of this is due to its scale: eschewing the intimacy of her previous works, the performance, which was premiered at Manchester’s Aviva Studios this month (October 2025) and will tour internationally in 2026, features a 70-strong cast and unfolds over a sprawling four hours.

But it also draws her back to her childhood in Belgrade, Serbia, a period she has described as one of ‘communism mixed with mysticism’ (then, the city was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Her strict parents were installed in the country’s Communist government (she has previously called them members of the ‘red bourgeoisie’), while her religious grandmother – who brought up Abramović until she was six – engaged in spiritual and healing rituals, a dichotomy that has no doubt influenced the artist’s oeuvre.

As such, Balkan Erotic Epic begins with the funeral procession of Josip Broz Tito, former president of Yugoslavia, led by a swaddled figure evoking her mother, Danica (played by Maria Stamenković Herranz, she appears throughout). From there, unfolding over 13 acts – through which guests are encouraged to wander and congregate – Abramović weaves personal memory with collective history, enlivened by bold, erotically charged reimaginings of Balkan folklore and ancestral traditions (acts include ‘Fertility Rite’, ‘Massaging the Breast’ and ‘In Scaring the Gods’, the last seeing performers expose their bodies to banish storms).

London-based fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić – who, with her eponymous label Roksanda has long forged connections with the art world – felt like a natural collaborator on the project. She also hails from Belgrade, Serbia, and her expressive clothing has often drawn on the traditional dress codes of the region (for S/S 2024, she looked towards the 4th-century Gračanica monastery and the rich decorative history of such Orthodox landmarks).

‘Marina has such a natural intuition when it comes to choosing the right people to work with. When the first talks about this project started in Manchester, she reached out and asked if I would like to join the team,’ Ilinčić tells Wallpaper*, having first met Abramović during her 2014 ‘512 Hours’ exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries.

‘We’re both from [the same place], and we share a deep connection to the same traditions and stories that shaped us. This piece was inspired by Balkan customs and myths, and it immediately felt close to my heart. I said yes immediately.’

Drawing on ‘old, pagan rituals and beliefs’, the costumes present a contemporary slant on folk costume – from a monastic taffeta gown (so long it pools on the floor around the performer) to white tasselled dresses evoking traditional Serbian folk costume. For Abramović herself, she created a simple bias-cut gown in black silk – a riff on the artist’s typically monochrome uniform. ‘All costumes have strong folk influences, but I wanted to present them as modern versions, seen through the lens of our times and – above all – Marina’s own incredible vision,’ says Ilinčić.

It is not the first time that the designer has created costumes for the stage: in 2022, she collaborated with the Royal Ballet to design the costumes for Valentino Zucchetti's Prima, part of the company’s A Diamond Celebration. ‘I like to maintain the same visual language that I have built through the years, but it’s also important to align with the artist’s vision and needs of performers,’ she says of working on these multidisciplinary projects. ‘Longevity of the costumes and ease of movement are also important to consider.’

Seeing the performance in Manchester, Ilinčić says, was ‘truly incredible’. ‘I am a huge admirer of Marina’s work and to be able to observe the process and contribute in some way is such a tremendous highlight for me and my team,’ she says.

Commissioned by Factory International, ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’ was premiered at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, before it goes on tour in 2026. Starting in Barcelona in January 2026, it will head to the piece’s co-commissioners, Gran Teatre del Liceu (24-30 January 2026), Berliner Festspiele, Park Avenue Armory and WestK.

In 2010, Marina Abramović sat on a chair in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art for 736 hours and 30 minutes as part of her performance piece, The Artist is Present. As she sat, members of the public were invited to sit opposite her and, quite simply, stare into her eyes. In a fast-paced world, and an even faster-paced New York, it was radical, and often moving, to simply sit, stare and acknowledge.

One of the most captivating things about The Artist is Present was its simplicity. There were no fancy props or special effects – just two people and two chairs. This functionality is a recurring theme in the work of the Serbian conceptual and performance artist.

Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising, then, that Abramović has now turned her hand to design, and specifically the design of chairs, unveiling her debut furniture collection at Mexico City Art Week this month (February 2025). The collection, called Elephant in the Room, has been created in collaboration with woodworking design studio La Metropolitana.

Abramović is late to join our video call to discuss the collection, calling me to apologise from the back of a cab in Mexico City. When she finally appears on-screen, she assures me that, in Mexico, arriving 10-to-15 minutes late is normal, so much so that there’s an idiom for it which translates to ‘I am already there, but not yet’.

Naturally, I'm keen to understand what attracted the 'grandmother of performance art' to the medium of design: 'There's actually a lot of crossover between the two in my work, because I constantly use objects that people can sit, stand and lie on – that they can use,’ she says. I’m reminded of Abramović's 1974 performance, Rhythm 0, where she laid out a series of objects, including scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun and a bullet, and stood still while the public was invited to do whatever they wanted to her.

‘I love functionality,’ continues Abramović. ‘I hate coffee table books with a passion. I hate that no one ever reads them and they’re purely decorative.’ She is inspired by the approach of the Japanese: ‘It's not that they don't have stuff, it’s that their stuff is always fit for purpose. In spring time, they will put the spring vase on the table. When winter comes, they bring out the winter vase.’ Abramović also admires the philosophy of the Shakers, the Christian sect who live by the mantra ‘beauty rests on utility’. Spatial minimalism, she says, allows for a ‘free mind’: ‘I have enough going on in my head. Emptiness is something that I like. Emptiness and void.’

Sure enough, the chairs that make up Elephant in the Room are minimal and unadorned. They are made of wood and copper, with what look like little shoes on the ends of the legs.

Despite this, the collection represents a domestication of Abramović’s work that feels incongruous. Functional objects have usually acted as a prop to her art, with the exception of her 1988 collection Transitory Objects, a series of objects that ‘were there for the public to interact with’: a copper bed to lie on, a quartz cushion to lean on, an iron chair to sit on.

Abramović made these as a reaction to a previous performance, The Lovers, an epic adventure where she walked half the length of the Great Wall of China (roughly 2,000km) to meet her partner, German performance artist Ulay, in the middle, where they planned to get married. (Organising the walk, however, turned out to be a maze of red tape which took five years to navigate. By this point, the pair had grown apart and, while they agreed to go ahead with the walk, they decided that they would meet to break up rather than to marry.) ‘When I got back from China, I realised that the public had not been present – we’d been completely alone in nature,’ recalls Abramović. ‘I started thinking about creating something that the public could participate in.’ The result was Transitory Objects.

Elephant in the Room may represent a domestication, but, for the artist, ‘domestic’ is not an insult: ‘My grandmother’s kitchen table was the centre of my world. Now, in America, you have these enormous, super-luxurious kitchens, and nobody even cooks. You just pick up the phone and order a pizza. People don’t have that domestic life anymore, and that’s so sad. Our lives have become so complicated that we forget about the power of simplicity.’

Just because something is minimalist or mundane – stripped back to its most essential components – it doesn’t mean that it is devoid of meaning, says Abramović. Take her performance art: while some may see it as simply existing for shock value, the artist insists that she ‘never [makes] art to provoke’. ‘To me, that’s cheap and vulgar,’ she continues. ‘I create work that makes people think, and if you’re just shocked then you’re not thinking about it.’ Similarly, Elephant in the Room, says Abramović, is ‘all about the content, what I want to say. Not about decoration’.

What does she ‘want to say’ with Elephant in the Room? This was where La Metropolitana, and its founding trio Rodrigo Escobedo, Mauricio Guerrero and Alex Gutiérrez, came in. ‘They think about the history of the wood, which ties into the history of Mexico. They work with indigenous people, local artisans and disadvantaged people. They also use traditional techniques and ethical craftsmanship,’ says Abramović. ‘La Metropolitana wants to tell the stories of their objects. It’s not just about production for hotels and so on, which is why it was so important for me to work with them.’

The materials used in the collection range from precious wood sourced from government seizures to copper recovered from coins and industrial waste. This copper, according to Abramović, represents nervous and energetic systems. This is something of a full circle moment: the Transitory Objects were functional, but the materials they were made of, to Abramović’s mind, also made them vessels to ‘trigger physical or mental experiences’.

Elephant in the Room was inaugurated with a piece of performance art, further imbuing the pieces with meaning. When they were launched, a dinner was held at the La Metropolitana factory. The chairs all had different words written on the back – ‘risk’, ‘love’, ‘adventure’, ‘insecurity’ , ‘harmony’ – and guests had to pick one to sit on. One of the chairs was labelled ‘elephant’, and the person who sat on this wasn’t allowed to talk (as one doesn’t discuss the ‘elephant in the room’).

‘Nothing just because it’s beautiful, it has to be functional,’ Abramović says. Design and art doesn't have to be beautiful, according to Abramović and La Metropolitana, but it does have to have meaning.

In partnership with Switzerland Tourism

Whether you’re more into boreal forest-inspired paintings or tantalising textiles, plot some surefire cultural highlights into your itinerary with our pick of Switzerland’s best art exhibitions to see in 2025, at 11 of the most important Swiss art museums.

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen near Basel

‘Northern Lights’, 26 January – 25 May 2025

The northern hemisphere’s vast boreal forest is the inspiration shared by 74 landscape masterpieces, painted by artists from Scandinavia and Canada between 1888 and 1937, brought together for Fondation Beyeler’s new exhibition.

Stretching south and north of the polar circle, forming one of Earth’s largest primeval woodlands, the snowy boreal (meaning northern) forest has a magical appeal; cold, darkness and the heavenly pyrotechnics of the Northern Lights have long provided elemental drama and atmospheric mis en scène.

Focusing on a specifically Nordic way of painting, the ‘Northern Lights’ exhibition traces the development of boreal forest landscapes in modern art through selected works by Helmi Biese, Anna Boberg, Emily Carr, Prince Eugen, Gustaf Fjæstad, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lawren S Harris, Hilma af Klint, JEH MacDonald, Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin, Harald Sohlberg and Tom Thomson.

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Kunstmuseum Basel

‘Medardo Rosso – Inventing Modern Sculpture’, 29 March – 10 August 2025

Little known but highly influential, Medardo Rosso was a 1900s revolutionary. A sculptor, photographer, and master of artful staging, Rosso was both rival and role model to his contemporaries and countless artists across subsequent generations. To trace the artist’s radical, formal, material, and technical explorations, this comprehensive retrospective showcases bronze, plaster and wax sculptures, and hundreds of his photographs and drawings, alongside work by more than 50 artists from the last hundred years – among them Francis Bacon, Edgar Degas, Yayoi Kusama, Auguste Rodin, and Andy Warhol – whose concerns and technical approaches resonate with Rosso’s.

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Museum Tinguely, Basel

‘Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art’, until 11 May 2025

For decades, in storefronts and boutiques all over the world, there have been close links between art and shop window display. Marcel Duchamp designed his first shop window in 1945 for the launch of a book by André Breton in New York; Swiss artist Jean Tinguely worked as a professional window dresser in Basel; and Andy Warhol effectively launched his pop art aesthetic via a window dressing commission for the Gunther Jaeckel department store back in 1961. Flipping the medium, window displays have also featured frequently as a motif in artworks, or served as a stage for performances and installations.

This new exhibition, ‘Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art’, explores the eventful relationship between art and retail commerce, artists and shop windows, from its beginnings to the present day. Artistic interventions across stores in Basel will extend the show into public spaces.

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Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

‘Le Corbusier. The Order of Things’, 8 February – 22 June 2025

To coincide with its 20-year anniversary, the Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting a major exhibition to the Swiss-French artist-architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965). One of the most influential protagonists of modern architecture and art, Le Corbusier tried to harness his unbridled creativity and enormous energy to reshape the world according to his ideas, to ‘order’ it and create a new living environment through functional and aesthetic architecture. Today, some of his buildings are Unesco World Heritage Sites. The exhibition is based around Le Corbusier’s three-dimensional thought and design. The prelude to the architecture is at the centre: the artistic experiment in the ‘workshop of patient research’, as Le Corbusier described his artistic work.

The permanent exhibition ‘Kosmos Klee. The Collection’ rounds up the visit with a chronological overview of Klee's artistic oeuvre through 70 works, as well as biographical material and archive items.

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Plateforme 10, Lausanne

Permanent exhibition

A 25,000 sq m art project sited on a former Lausanne locomotive repair shed, Plateforme 10 brings together the significant resources of three institutions: the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-arts de Lausanne, the Musée de Design et d'Arts Appliqués Contemporains (Mudac) and the Musée de l'Élysée, as well as the collections of the Fondation Toms Pauli and the Fondation Felix Vallotton.

Plateforme 10’s impressive, permanent exhibition, laid out chronologically over two floors, displays treasures from the local canton of Vaud’s art collections, with some 300 works dating from the 18th century to the present day. The museum’s historical collection explores major trends in post-Second World War creativity, geometric abstraction, neo-Fauvism, new media’s video and installation pieces, alongside drawings, paintings and ‘art autre’ of the second Paris School.

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MASI Lugano

‘Louisa Gagliardi’, 16 February – 20 July 2025

MASI’s 2025 exhibition programme focuses on rediscoveries, creative synergies and compelling narratives, offering a fresh exploration of Switzerland’s visual arts history and its dynamic, international trajectory.

The programme opens with an exhibition by Louisa Gagliardi, one of the most intriguing figures in Swiss contemporary art. Gagliardi’s work merges digital technology with traditional painting techniques, creating compositions rich in unexpected details that blend the familiar with the unknown. Drawing inspiration from artistic movements such as Surrealism, Metaphysics and Magical Realism, she crafts an imaginative world that reflects the transformative shifts of the post-internet era.

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Fotomuseum Winterthur

‘Poulomi Basu Phantasmagoria’, 25 October 2025 – 15 February 2026

Following an extensive renovation and redevelopment programme, Fotomuseum Winterthur will reopen in May 2025. From October 2025 the museum will present an exhibition by Indian artist Poulomi Basu. Interweaving documentary photographs and staged scenes enacted in front of fantastical backdrops, Basu creates multimedia, often large-scale installations. Here, the exhibition’s title references the 18th-century phantasmagorias that captivated audiences with projections and optical illusions. The artist also employs virtual reality, film and performance in her practice, using the activist potential of different media to champion the rights of marginalised groups.

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Museum Für Gestaltung Zürich

‘Textile Manifestos – From Bauhaus to Soft Sculpture’, 14 February – 13 July 2025

Fanciful fringes and embroideries, geometrically ordered weavings and spatial free forms; ‘Textile Manifestos – From Bauhaus to Soft Sculpture’ celebrates a graphic and colourful variety of crafted materials. Expect anonymous, provocative pieces next to well-known abstract works by the likes of America’s Sheila Hicks, and New Tapestry movement figurehead Elsi Giauque.

Surprising adjacencies of comparable perspectives from different periods emerge – a powerful commonality that includes the creative hand and a touch of magic. Quiet statements as well as the occasional activist message enhance the pulling power of these textile creations.

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Kunsthaus Zürich

‘Marina Abramović Retrospective’, until 16 February 2025

Including works from every phase of Marina Abramović’s extraordinary career, alongside iconic performances and a new, interactive piece, the Kunsthaus Zürich presents the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective in Switzerland. Abramović is known for her durational performances that explore physical and mental limits, inviting visitors to experience mindfulness and self-perception; this retrospective spans video, photography, sculpture and drawing, along with live restagings of iconic works including Imponderabilia and Luminosity. A new, interactive piece, Decompression Chamber, was designed by Abramović especially for Kunsthaus Zürich.

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Museum Rietberg, Zürich

‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’, 4 April – 17 August 2025

‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’ showcases South Korea’s vibrant and diverse popular culture. Since the late 1990s, this cultural phenomenon has made waves around the world. This exhibition explores the genesis of Hallyu and its ties to traditional Korean fine arts as well as examines global influences in pop culture, cinema, fashion, and media. Embracing K-Pop costumes, dance routines famed worldwide, unforgettable film props, and clips from music videos, beauty trends, and Korean fashion, ‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’ is a dazzling kaleidoscope of South Korean art and cultural history. Some of the highlights that will captivate the public include works by media art pioneer Nam June Paik, a set design from the Oscar-winning film Parasite, a dance-along rendition of ‘Gangnam Style’, and the intriguing revival by South Korean pop stars of traditional hanbok garb.

Following a successful tour through London, Boston, and San Francisco, Museum Rietberg presents this spectacular exhibition in cooperation with the Victoria & Albert Museum on its only stop in Europe.

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The breaking news of Margot Robbie becoming the new face of Chanel No.5 (and starring in a Luca Guadagnino-directed campaign film alongside Jacob Elordi), plus the reveal of Marina Abramović’s new range of skincare, are just two of the beauty features on Wallpaper.com that you loved reading in 2024.

Below, find a wider selection of articles that got you clicking and scrolling, including a look at Dyson’s latest science fiction-like styling tool and a 15-step illustrated guide outlining the meticulous process of a Korean scalp treatment.

The most-read Wallpaper* beauty stories from 2024

1. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi almost become lovers in Luca Guadagnino’s Chanel No.5 campaign

In October, Margot Robbie was announced as the new face of Chanel No.5. (2024 also saw Robbie front a nightclub-inspired‘Rouge Allure Velvet’ lipstick collection). See You at 5, an accompanying Chanel No.5 campaign film also starring Jacob Elordi and shot by Luca Guadagnino, saw the two actors ‘almost’ become lovers, as they attempt to meet one another against the backdrop of the setting California sun.

Read the full feature here.

2. How the 15-step Korean scalp treatment rejuvenates hair like nothing else

For the Wallpaper* February 2024 Design Awards issue, we presented a beauty award to the Eco Jardin hair salon in Seoul, for its meticulous 15-step scalp treatment. Including a microscopic scalp analysis, massage, steam LED light therapy and more, Lucy Birant illustrated each step of the process.

Read the full feature here.

3. Marina Abramović releases a skincare and wellness range ‘inspired by mindfulness’

In January, artist Marina Abramović brought the principles of her ‘mindfulness-based’ Longevity Method to a new skincare and wellness collection developed with Dr Nonna Brenner. The project certainly raised a few eyebrows – was it another performance piece, perhaps? Or was she deadly serious? – the Wallpaper.com feature on the products and ideas behind them certainly got people talking.

Read the full feature here.

4. Poor Things’ Oscar-winning make-up and hair: behind-the-scenes interview

Yorgos Lanthimos’ film Poor Things, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Grey, received critical acclaim. Winning a Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival, it also garnered 11 nominations at the Academy Awards, with Emma Stone winning Best Actress for her performance as Bella Baxter. The hair and make-up design team, led by Nadia Stacey, also received several accolades including an Academy Award and a BAFTA. We interviewed Stacey about her work on the film on Wallpaper.com.

Read the full feature here.

5. First look: how Diptyque used synaesthesia to create its poetic new perfume collection

Diptyque launched a new luxury perfume collection in the summer of 2024, ‘Les Essences de Diptyque’, which was (true to Diptyque’s form) inspired by the natural world. Here, five unique fragrances captured ‘the scent of coral and mother of pearl’, with five unique fragrances designed by a team of noses using synaesthesia. We interviewed them all for a first look at the project on Wallpaper.com.

Read the full feature here.

6. The new Dyson ‘Airwrap i.d.’ will style your hair using an app

Dyson made further strides in hair and beauty in 2024, with ‘Chitosan’ (its first-ever range of hair care products) and the ‘Airwrap i.d.’, an updated model of its beloved ‘Airwrap’ styling tool. Upon its launch in August, we covered the news on Wallpaper.com, revealing the ‘Airwrap i.d.’ works in tandem with the ‘MyDyson’ app to carry out a personalised curling sequence at the touch of a button.

Read the full feature here.

7. The Substance: how Pierre-Olivier Persin transformed Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley with prosthetic make-up design

The Substance was a film on everyone’s lips in 2024, drumming up plenty of ‘discourse’ for its subject matter and visual language. Directed by Coralie Fargeat and starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, the story of Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) and her ‘other self ’Sue (Qualley) came to life through the visionary prosthetic make-up design by Pierre Oliver Persin. We spoke with Persin to gain insight into transforming the actors into the grotesque and comedically tragic characters ‘Gollum’ and ‘Monstro Elisasue’.

Read the full feature here.

8. Bleach London’s permanent dyes transform hair (without using bleach)

Session stylist Alex Brownsell (who has worked with everyone from Gucci and Versace to Celine and Marc Jacobs) founded the east London hair salon Bleach in 2010, after growing tired of dying her friends’ hair in the kitchen sink. In 2024, however, Bleach made a revolutionary development for dying hair at home, with its ‘No Bleach London’ permanent box dyes, which create vibrant colour without any bleach at all. Brownsell shared her insights on the products with Wallpaper*.

Read the full feature here.

9. Jamie Dornan takes a bath in Le Corbusier’s villa for Loewe Perfumes

In September, the news broke that brand ambassadors Jamie Dornan and Sophie Wilde were the new faces of Loewe Perfumes. A portrait series and film by David Sims saw Dornan and Wilde make themselves at home inside the master bathroom in Villa Savoye, which was designed and built in the 1930s by Le Corbusierand Pierre Jeanneret. The 2024 campaign also spotlighted four scents from Loewe Perfumes’ ‘Botanical Rainbow’ and ‘Un Paseo por Madrid’ collections: ‘Esencia’, ‘Agua Drop’, ‘Un Paseo por Madrid Doré’ and ‘Prado’.

Read the full feature here.

10. What makes a ‘winter perfume’? The Wallpaper* guide to fragrances that linger on the skin and in the air

As temperatures dropped in November, we turned our focus to a selection of potent and long-lasting perfumes for the winter months. This includes fragrances from the Dior ‘Esprit de Parfum’ collection, also featured in the Wallpaper* December Entertaining Issue, ‘L’Eau d’Hiver’, by nose Jean Claude Ellena for Frederic Malle, and more.

Read the full feature here.

Over her 55-year-long practice, artist Marina Abramović has pushed the limits of the physical body and toyed with the possibilities of the mind. This spans from her controversial early work in the 1970s, titled Rhythm Series, to her collaborative pieces with Ulay, and the renowned 2010 performance The Artist is Present, staged at MoMA, in which the Belgrade-born artist elicited intense emotional responses in audience members by staring at them in silence.

Abramović has since tied the threads of her work together to form The Abramović Method, a series of mindfulness techniques that can be applied to everyday life. This can involve such actions as counting grains of rice, opening and closing a door, or slowly and consciously drinking a glass of water over a 20-minute timeframe. (It reportedly even helped Lady Gaga quit smoking).

Marina Abramović: The Longevity Method

Now (January 2023), Abramović has launched a range of skincare and wellness products that incorporate key principles of The Abramović Method. ‘The Abramović Longevity Method is a lifestyle and a philosophy that emphasises the importance of living in harmony with nature,’ she explains. ‘It is rooted in the belief that true beauty and vitality come from nurturing ourselves holistically.’ Each product has been developed in Switzerland with Dr Nonna Brenner, a prestigious wellness practitioner with a centre located on the banks of Fuschl Am See in Austria, and is inspired by the bespoke, all-natural range of recipes she has developed for the artist over their 20-year friendship (Brenner also had a hand in Marina Abramović’s diet soup, part of our artist’s recipe series).

The product range features a face lotion that acts as a cleanser, exfoliant and moisturiser in one, and has been formulated with hydrating botanicals, essential oils, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, white bread, and white wine. Then there are three different types of botanical drops created for their energising, immunising, and anti-allergenic properties. Respectively, the drops contain fresh garlic bulb, fresh lemon, Shiajit, whole Hawthorn fruit, chilli pepper powder and flower pollen; Mumie (Shilajit) and Liquiritiae root dust; and cranberry concentrate and grape seed flour.

‘My recipes for these all-natural wellbeing products we are launching focus on embracing the philosophy of healing through nature,’ says Dr Brenner. ‘They rediscover forgotten rituals and knowledge of the past associated with beauty and wellness, reimagining them for use today, with longevity at the heart of each product. Put simply, it’s all about beauty inside and out.’

There is a limited first run of each product (2,000 units to be exact) in packaging personally designed by Marina Abramović, featuring the artist’s fingerprints, alongside those of Dr Nonna Brenner. ‘I hope that all of you can benefit from them,’ says Abramović. ‘I think that for me, as an artist, and Dr Nonna as a doctor, this is a unique collaboration.’

The Marina Abramović Longevity Method Face Lotion is available for £199. The Marina Abramović Longevity Method Drops are £99 each.

abramoviclongevity.com

Marina Abramović is the first woman to have a solo show at the Royal Academy. This seems no less strange when you remember that this show has been postponed at least once. But as the doors to this long-awaited show finally opened, it was clear that the moment had not been lost.

This survey (open until 1 January 2024 and anticipated since Abramović's ‘Seven Deaths’ at London’s Lisson Gallery in 2021) covers five decades of practice and showcases works combining performance, installation, film and photography. It begins with human connection, trauma and pain, transitions through endurance and ends up in a place of meditation, peace and transcendence, tracking Abramović, probably one of the world’s most famous living artists, through a life dedicated to art. 

Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy

As I shuffled between the two nude performers restaging Abramović and Ulay’s Imponderabilia, 1977, it was abundantly clear that this exhibition could not have happened during the pandemic. As I emerged into the next room, filled with participatory works that we were invited to touch, get into and wear, it became clearer still that this exhibition and indeed Abramović’s work, is about bringing people in, close contact, a guilelessness and an unbridled, almost aggressive sharing of the self. 

In this show, we start with this personal connection. The artist is present as you enter, caught between the gazes of Abramović on one wall and a revolving roster of the 1,545 who queued up to sit opposite her at MoMA New York in 2010, perhaps the high point of her practice, an exhibition so impactful it was immortalised in film. Titled ‘Public Participation I’, this room leads into ‘Public Participation II’, which takes us to another seminal moment in the artist’s career, one which altered her view of the world around her and set her on her path, Rhythm 0, 1974. 

The now infamous performance work staged in Naples in 1974, involved Abramović and 72 objects including cake, wine, a feather boa, a razor, knives and a gun. For six hours, visitors were allowed to do anything with objects and the artist, with Abramović stating, ‘I am the object’. What followed can only have been a life-altering experience as while things started gently, as time progressed people spat on, cut, kissed, undressed her, gave her roses and put a loaded gun in her hand. She has since talked about the impression this experience left on her saying, ‘It was six hours of real horror’.

The focus is on the era of Abramović’s practice where she was both on her own and with her partner and collaborator Ulay, pushing themselves to the limit emotionally and physically. This endurance-based performance art she now teaches through her institute is at the heart of everything she does, pushing the body and the spirit to the absolute limit to the point of fainting, collapsing through physical pain, and revealing something of the artistic process and the life lived to facilitate them in a series of works captured on film and in photography. The sound of her and Ulay’s cries echo through the space; is this an exorcism or a rageful scream into each other? As we see Abramović violently brush her thick, gorgeous hair repeating ‘art is supposed to be beautiful’, it is hard not to conclude that she is looking for something in the pain she is inflicting on herself and finding something there.

There is a darkness in the work throughout her career after she and Ulay end their relationship in their famous walk to each other, meeting at the centre of the Great Wall of China in The Great Wall Walk, 1988/2008, but the focus is different. It takes us from her work looking at the war in Yugoslavia, Balkan Baroque, 1997, to the famous The House with the Ocean View, 2002, where she lived for 12 hours a day in a three-room structure observed constantly for that time with only ladders made of knives for an escape.

The works meant for meditation and healing are for public participation, and those who stepped into her Shoes for Departure, 1991, where you press your forehead into one of the stone rests that make up Black Dragons, 1990, or pass through Portal, a doorway lined with crystals, really focus on getting something from the process. After the storm of the earlier works is the calm and the focus of the later works, interspersed with long-durational performance work. While this is at times a harrowing show, it is also filled with care and testament to the exhibition’s opening statement, ‘the spirit in any condition does not burn’.

‘Marina Abramović’ at the Royal Academy, 23 September 2023 – 1 January 2024

royalacademy.org.uk

Marina Abramović returns to the consideration of the body in the exhibition 'Energy Clothes', at Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger until 29 July 2023. Abramović is showcasing work created especially for the show, including a large-format new photo series and installation, alongside drawings and videos. 

Marina Abramović, ‘Energy Clothes’

Abramović also returns to early photographic works in the exhibition, with works from performances Rhythm 2 (1974/1994), Rhythm 4 (1974/1994), Rhythm 10 (1973/2014) and Freeing the Voice (1975/2014) emphasising her fascination with performance as a visual art form. They mark the pinnacle of Abramović’s pursuit of physically and emotionally challenging performances, which have seen her pushing the boundaries of her own identity, creating works that rethink the accepted conventions of time. Either in a partnership with German artist Ulay, from 1975 – 1988, or solo from 1989, she explored the capacity for pain and endurance.

The pieces also build on Abramović’s desire to share her work with her audience, exploring energy forces as a two-way relationship between performer and viewer in works that consider Asian philosophies and ritualistic ceremonies in Latin America and Australia. 

'Energy Clothes' expands on her sculptures, videos, sounds and objects exhibited all around the world, including in group exhibitions at the Biennale di Venezia (1976 and 1997) and at the Documenta VI, VII and XI in Kassel.

Marina Abramović ‘Energy Clothes’ runs until 29 July 2023 at the Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna

galerie-krinzinger.at

The NFT hype may have dampened since its stratospheric rise in 2021, but Serbian artist Marina Abramović, ever the forward thinker, is looking beyond with the release of her first performance in the Web3 space. Launching Monday 25 July at 2pm UTC on the energy-efficient Tezos blockchain, The Hero 25FPS is a digital reworking of one of the artist’s most personal and autobiographical works, featuring her stoically clad in black, astride a white horse and holding a large white flag. 

‘The Hero was filmed in 2001, around the time of the death of my father Vojo,’ Abramović explains. ‘He was a national hero from the Second World War and I wanted to create an homage to him.’

Abramović’s debut NFT drop is a collaboration with the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (Circa), which describes itself as ‘a digital art and culture platform with purpose’. It coincides with the broadcast of The Hero on an international network of screens, spanning London, Seoul, Milan, Berlin, Japan and New York, at 20:22 local time every evening for three months. 

‘When [Circa artistic director and founder] Josef O’Connor invited me to participate in Circa 2022, I immediately thought of The Hero because right now, we are facing a Third World War. We never set out to create an NFT – it came as a surprise,’ the artist says. 

Originally filmed in PAL (4:3 aspect ratio), the video work required several months of post-production, each individual frame edited to adapt it for widescreen. ‘I really wanted the image to envelop the audience,’ says the artist. ‘As with all my work, the audience completes the work. My first performance on the blockchain will invite people to collect either a single frame (.jpg) or a sequence of frames (.gif) to acquire time. They decide how much of the movement and experience they can have with the work.’

So why has the artist chosen to revisit a two-decade-old work – and what relevance does it have today? ‘Right now, we are in such a strange moment in our world. We are destroying our planet where we live, our real home, the Earth, and there are all the wars that are going on in the world. We need heroes,’ she asserts, naming Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and climate activist Txai Suruí, the only Indigenous woman to speak at the COP26 climate conference, among her ‘new heroes’. 

The term Web3 (originally Web3.0) was coined in 2014 by computer scientist Gavin Wood, founder of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies and a co-founder of Ethereum, to describe his vision for a decentralised and more democratic Internet. ‘For me, the entire world has always been divided into two categories: originals and the ones who follow,’ reflects Abramović. ‘The originals are visionary – they’re always thinking out of the box. And often in the time they are alive, they’re not understood at all. Sometimes it takes years after they are dead, even hundreds of years, for them to be properly understood. Today, we need people with this vision to create new ways of learning and forms of art.’

Abramović has previously been vocal about her skepticism of NFTs, but draws parallels to the acceptance of video and performance art as new artistic mediums, which both faced similar criticisms and resistance in their early days.

‘When we started to work in the immaterial [in the 1970s], galleries and museums couldn’t sell anything because there was nothing [physical] to sell,’ she says. ‘Likewise, video was a mess when it was invented. Then came Nam June Paik and video art was born. Paik once said, “I think the best technology, information, has to do with our education – our thinking.”’

For Abramović, the potential of Web3 extends beyond NFTs. ‘In many ways, we are beginning to see how this new tool can make a difference in the world,’ says the artist, citing Bail Bloc as an example. The app, developed by The New Inquiry magazine, allows anyone to volunteer computing power to mine cryptocurrency that is used to pay for Americans without bail funds to get out of jail. ‘The work [Pussy Riot co-founder and social activist] Nadya Tolokonnikova is doing with UnicornDAO is also very inspiring to me,’ Abramović adds. The cryptocurrency investment fund raised $6.7m for Ukraine earlier this year and recently launched legalabortion.eth, where people can donate crypto to be fully distributed to reproductive rights organisations following the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v Wade.

Similarly, Abramović is donating a percentage of the proceeds of her NFTs towards ‘Hero Grants’, inviting people working within Web3 to submit ideas ‘that make the world a better, more beautiful place’ via the Circa website. She says: ‘I want to see what other ideas people have in this Web3 space to help save our planet. People who demonstrate heroic vision will then receive a grant in the coming months. The grants we shall award from The Hero 25FPS is my small way of contributing to this future.’

Ultimately, the artist is seeking to empower the next generation. ‘The future of performance art sits within the hearts and minds of this new generation who are working with these new technologies. They are experimenting with this new Web3 space and testing its potential. They are taking risks and building new worlds,’ says Abramović. ‘We have to guide and nurture the future. I am not an expert [on Web3] but I am learning, and what I fundamentally understand is that blockchain technology provides artists with sovereignty over themselves and their work – this is very important to me. This is a very challenging time for young people, especially artists. Art is always going to exist. And in 2022, the white flag I held all those years ago stands for peace.’ 

INFORMATION

THE HERO 25FPS NFTs launch on Monday, 25 July 2022 at 2pm UTC. Visit nft.circa.art to register your interest in the public mint or apply for a Hero Grant. mai.art

‘I am an international gypsy with two suitcases running from place to place!’ enthuses Marina Abramović only moments into our conversation. Halfway through a four-month trip that includes 19 stops, the indefatigable artist is back to her nomadic ways after an unplanned sabbatical – prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic – of reading books, growing vegetables, and planting trees in the countryside. 

For now, the Serbian performance artist is in London to open a duet of solo exhibitions across Lisson Gallery’s spaces on Cork Street and Lisson Street, the culmination of her lifelong preoccupation with Greek American opera singer Maria Callas. An immersive film installation, Seven Deaths, captures a series of heart-rending demises that Abramović undergoes on-screen, to the soundtrack of seven Callas solos.

The artist’s fascination with the ill-fated diva began in her grandmother’s kitchen in Belgrade, when she was 14 years old. From the radio, an unfamiliar voice – Callas’ voice – pierced the space. ‘I remember standing up in the middle of the kitchen and starting to cry. It was immediately emotional. And I have no idea why,’ she says. Now 74, Abramović has spent much of her life endeavouring to make a work in tribute to the woman who inspired her. 

Ideas for the project percolated in various guises over the decades, from film to a theatre play. Abramović settled on an opera – an unlikely medium for the radical performance artist – with 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which debuted in Munich last year. ‘I am secure in my skin as a performance artist, so I was interested in doing something new, to go into a world that I had never been to before,’ says Abramović of her first foray into the traditional art form. ‘The opera world has such strict rules – so it’s a good thing to break them.’

And break them she does. Joined by long-term collaborator, actor Willem Dafoe, the artist adds a new twist to the macabre fates she meets in the course of an hour and 50 seconds in her film homage at Lisson: from consumption (set to La Traviata); to jumping (Tosca); strangulation (Otello); harakiri (Madama Butterfly); knifing (Carmen); madness (Lucia di Lammermoor) and self-immolation (Norma). Here, Abramović commits to her different characters – herself, Callas, or the jilted bride, among others – with abandon.

In the opening act, Dafoe tends to Abramović, who lies bedridden and wan in a faithful recreation of Callas’ bedroom, down to the Madonna in front of her bed and the sleeping pills next to her telephone. The roles are reversed in the second scene, when Dafoe appears lifeless in the artist’s arms before she takes a fatal leap from a skyscraper (the only vignette which required more than one take, she notes). In her reimagining of Otello, Abramović is suffocated by a snake, while the ritual suicide of Madama Butterfly is replaced with the artist ripping off a hazmat suit and exposing herself to radiation.

The work reaches its climax as the pair – dressed throughout in custom Burberry looks designed by Riccardo Tisci – walk in tandem at a glacial pace into a raging fire. ‘Willem taught me so much about what acting means, because it is completely contrary to performance art,’ explains Abramović. ‘He showed me that you can get into the role so deeply that you become that role, and that was a new teaching for me.

The Lisson exhibition continues at Cork Street, where Abramović is exhibiting an ethereal series of photorealistic alabaster sculptures relating to her dramatic killings. The works mark a departure from her ‘normally immaterial’ practice: ‘We tried many different things and finally ended up using alabaster because it has rigidity, but also transparency – it both keeps the light within and can be illuminated by light.’

Abramović’s kinship with Callas reaches deeper than their shared classical facial features, painful relationships with their mothers, tumultuous love lives, magnetic personalities, and a shared star sign (the two Sagittariuses were born almost exactly 23 years apart). ‘What I admire about Callas is her incredible courage, strength and fragility, which exist at the same time,’ says the artist. ‘She was so strong on the stage and yet so lonely and unhappy in her life.’

Callas’ death, while not as overtly dramatic as Abramović’s cinematic representations, was just as tragic. The soprano died suddenly and alone in her Paris home in 1977 from a heart attack, aged 53. A recluse in her final years, the gifted Callas led an extraordinary life mired with personal tragedies: among them, blackmail by her mother, theft by her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini, and physical and sexual abuse by her paramour Aristotle Onassis. ‘The fact is, she simply lost the will to live,’ reflects Abramović. ‘In my case, I was also deeply in love once in my life. We both almost died from a broken heart – but my work saved me.’

Like Callas, Abramović’s personal life has been punctuated with turmoil – much of it public and part of her art. In spite of this grief, both on screen and off, is Abramović a romantic? ‘The Slavic soul is so romantic. We always suffer – if we don’t suffer in our private life, we suffer for eternity, for the universe,’ she says. ‘I always believed that nobody makes any good artwork from happiness because happiness is a state that you don’t like to change. But the suffering is where you really become creative.’

Her solo exhibitions at Lisson Gallery coincide with a recent pop-up experience presented in collaboration with WeTransfer’s digital arts platform, WePresent, at Shoreditch’s Old Truman Brewery. A virtual time capsule of sorts, Traces comprises five objects that the artist wants to carry into the future, such as an essay by Susan Sontag, a Martian rock and the resurrection plant Rose of Jericho. (The physical iteration of the project is now closed but can be experienced online.)

Elsewhere in London, Abramović will debut new and recent works in ‘Humble Works’ at Colnaghi gallery alongside friends and frequent collaborators Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich and Nico Vascellari, created in response to and presented in dialogue with a series of masterworks including a Veláquez portrait and an Etruscan burial urn.

Abramović’s London moment this autumn offers a tantalising prelude to a career-spanning survey of her work opening in 2023 at the Royal Academy, where she will be the first female artist to have a solo show across the entire Main Galleries. The retrospective’s title, ‘Afterlife’, suggests the always forward-thinking Abramović is looking beyond our mortal coil: ‘I’m done with dying,’ she quips. 

NFORMATION

‘Marina Abramović: Seven Deaths’, 14 September – 30 October 2021, Lisson Gallery, lissongallery.com

Traces, Abramović’s immersive project with WePresent, can be experienced online, wepresent.wetransfer.com

‘Humble Works’, 17 September – 22 November 2021, Colnaghi gallery, colnaghi.com

Marina Abramović is an artist who knows the power of a simple idea. Her seminal works are easy to summarise – walking the entire length of the Great Wall of China, living on three open platforms at a gallery for 12 days, locking eyes with 1,000 strangers from across a wooden table – while striking an emotional chord with audiences far beyond the art world and leaving a searing impression on our lives.

The Serbian conceptual and performance artist is widely admired for an enormous and unwavering self-discipline, and a willingness to push the boundaries of the human body and mind. These convictions are evident in the dish she has chosen for her Wallpaper* artist's palate recipe, which originates from a cookbook by Austrian doctor Nonna Brenner. The artist explains that the barely seasoned ‘diet soup’ of flax seeds, oats and oat bran is meant to be consumed on the first day of fasting: ‘Monastic, simple and pure, it is deeply satisfying and keeps your mind peaceful and clear.’ 

In September, the artist will have a notable presence in London. Her ‘Seven Deaths’, a new show of work inspired by the tragic life of operatic legend Maria Callas, runs from 14 September – 30 October at Lisson Gallery on Cork Street and Lisson Street; she will stage an ‘multimedia sensory experience’ with WePresent at the Old Truman Brewery, and will take part in a three-artist group show at Colnaghi which will also see works by Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich, and Nico Vascellari in dialogue with a range of historical masterworks. 

Find peace of mind with performance art pioneer Marina Abramović's soul-cleansing soup, as featured in our monthly Artist’s Palate series

Ingredients

Flax seeds
Oats
Oat bran
Pinch of herb salt
Zest from a frozen lemon

Method

Add 1.5 litres of water to a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Add all the ingredients and cook for 5 minutes, adding salt to taste. Add the lemon zest and serve. 

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2021 Style issue of Wallpaper* (W*269). On newsstands now, and available for free download. 

INFORMATION

lissongallery.com

mai.art

‘I can’t do performances in public like I used to, people follow me around and want to take selfies,’ said Marina Abramović at the opening of 'As One'. The exhibition has been developed in collaboration with Athens-based contemporary arts organisation NEON. On show at the city's Benaki Museum, the project saw Abramović self-select a group of Athenian artists to learn her globally famous practice, The Method. It’s a smart use of the celebrity Abramović’s work has garnered – and despite the selfies, she launched 'As One' with a two-week residency in Athens.

'As One' began with a callout for Greek artists interested in practising The Abramović Method, honed by the artist over 40 years in locales from São Paulo to New York. She then chose 29 candidates from 320 applications based on the intuitive criteria of ‘when they’re good, I know instantly’, to teach the levelling kernel of her manifesto: ‘It’s about pain and communication. People would rather text than phone, no-one makes eye-contact anymore. We need to communicate physically.’

This conviction runs through the performances. Abramović is clearly interested in the transformative effects offered by fear. Thanassis Akokkalidis' Don’t Look Down – an attempt to cure vertigo by standing on the precipice of a building – testified to Abramović’s commitment to self-actualisation as a harrowing process.

‘In Athens, Marina’s presence is very important,’ said NEON director Elina Kountouri. ‘She is key to helping people understand the power of durational performance.’

For Abramović, the residency is her most political to date and promotes art as political platform: ‘I’d like to take it to the Ukraine and Paris. Many governments view creativity as a luxury, but culture is a necessity. People can change consciousness by developing an awareness of themselves, that’s what performance does. I can only create change with art and performance, these are my tools.’

INFORMATION

'As One' is on view until 24 April. For more information, visit NEON's website

ADDRESS

Benaki Museum
Pireos 138
Athens

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London's Serpentine Gallery has united with The Vinyl Factory to offer limited-edition audio keepsakes from two of its current exhibitions. The special vinyls, launched to coincide with 'Marina Abramović: 512 Hours' and 'Ed Atkins', not only solve the poster dearth created by performance and digital art shows, but push the notion of the souvenir far further,  enabling visitors to take home the audio essence of each artist's sensory installations.

The vinyls are limited to 100 copies and are presented in a signed and numbered sleeve designed by each artist, making them collector's items. Abramović's edition features a recording of the Montenegrin American artist performing 'An Artist's Life Manifesto' recorded at the Serpentine Gallery in the days leading up to '512 Hours', which sees the artist perform within the gallery from 10am to 6pm, six days a week for the exhibition's duration. Track two captures the sounds of the void gallery space at 5pm on 6 June 2014.

Sample 'An Artist's Life Manifesto'

This is the first major performance by Abramović since her daily, three-month-long piece titled 'The Artist is Present' at the MoMA in 2010, in which visitors were invited to gaze into her eyes in complete silence for an unspecified amount of time.

Moving from real life to the cellular world, artist Ed Atkins works primarily with high definition video and text to subvert the conventions of moving pictures and literature.

In the case of his latest summer installation at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, the British creative's two 12" vinyls play three audio tracks from his multi-screen, digital avatar installation 'Ribbons' (2014), as well as a specially produced live reading by the artist of his text, 'Hammering the bars'.

Sample 'Ribbons'