Marina Abramović: The Life is the world's first mixed-reality art experience

Currently showing at the Serpentine Gallery
Images courtesy of Marina Abramović and Tin Drum
Juliana Piskorz21 February 2019

Marina Abramović’s new exhibition is weird. Radical performance art is what Abramović is known for and her latest work is no exception.

Showing at the Serpentine Gallery until February 24, Marina Abramović: The Life is billed as the world's first mixed reality art experience. More on what the hell that means later...

On arrival visitors are guided into a room by an assistant dressed in a white lab coat and relieved of all their possessions. No phones. No bags. Nothing.

More white coat-clad assistants will then fit you with a VR headset and guide you by the hand to the main exhibition. The whole effect is quite disconcerting. You're then steered towards a round antechamber filled with other visitors seemingly engrossed in nothing. Black squares calibrate the headset and in the centre of the room flashes the life sized figure of Abramović. Dressed in vermillion red, her dark hair tumbling down her back, the virtual apparition is momentarily startling against the expanse of white background.

Mixed reality combines Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality so you're able to see a virtual image within a real physical space. “This experiment is just the beginning,” said Abramović h in a press release. “I hope that many other artists will follow me and continue to pioneer Mixed Reality as an art form."

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade in the 1970s, Abramović has continually pushed the boundaries of performance art, exploring her own physical and mental limits. During her 1974 ‘Rhythm 5’ performance she lost consciousness after leaping into a blazing fire, the observing audience only realised she was in danger as the flames began licking her inert body.

‘The Life’ is distinctly less dramatic. The 19-minute performance consists of Abramović pacing a circle, gazing down at her arms and making ethereal gestures before disappearing in a cloud of sparkly blue dots. Despite its slow pace, there is something unsettling about the lifelike click-clacking of her shoes on the stone floor in contrast with the blurry holographic outline. I had an eerie feeling as if I were being watched by a ghost.

Nothing much happens in the 19 minutes, but this uncanny absence is strangely riveting. I leave feeling meditative, with a sense that I’ve gazed at nothing and everything at the same time.

© Harry Richards Photography.
Images courtesy of Marina Abramović and Tin Drum

Of course, this is the point. The exhibition examines Abramović’s long-standing fascination with the notion of material absence. “The fact that the project can be repeated anywhere in the world while I am not there is mind-blowing. I can be present in any spot on the planet,” says Abramović.

There are no flames or knives or bits of flying toe nail in Abramović’s latest instalment; ‘The Life’ is an altogether quieter, more cerebral experience.

Marina Abramović​: The Life at the Serpentine Gallery. February, 19 - February, 24. Entrance is free but visitors will have to pre-book online.

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