The retrospective exhibition of the Serbian artist and performer Marina Abramović, which opens to the public on Saturday at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, features Portuguese actor Duarte Melo in one of the performance pieces.
According to the company that manages it, Elite Lisbon, Duarte Melo is one of the actors who will play “Imponderabilia” (1977/2023), along with other artists chosen by the film team. Marina Abramović to recreate this performance live.
Duarte Melo, “the first and only Portuguese actor to work with the renowned artist”, has a degree in Theatre, with around a decade of professional experience in theatre, cinema and television. He has worked with Carlos Avilez, João Garcia Miguel, in the series "Glória" and in the soap opera "Quero É Viver", among other productions.
Marina Abramović, 76 years old, one of the most important names in the performing arts, is the first woman to exhibit individually at the Royal Academy of Arts, founded in 1768.
Graduated in painting and, in the 1970s, dedicated herself mainly to performing arts, Marina Abramović “is a pioneer in the use of the body in her work and has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental resistance”, wrote that institution.
The exhibition, with which the artist collaborated in the production, brings together photographs, video, objects, installations and four “fundamental performances” from her career, which question everyday gestures, intimacy, public space, the relationship between men and women .
In “Imponderabilia”, in which Duarte participates Melo, two artists are naked, very close, placed at an entrance, which forces the visitor to pass between them.
Another performance is “Nude with skeleton” (2002/2005/2023), in which a person lies naked beneath a human skeleton.
The exhibition also includes the video work “The Communist Body” (1979), in which it addresses communist ideals and the former Yugoslavia, and the installation “Balkan Baroque”, with which it calls, in video and with the placement of dozens of human bones, the war in the Balkans.
According to the Royal Academy of Arts, the exhibition also addresses the personal and artistic relationship and the separation between Marina Abramović and German artist Ulay, and ends with the installation “The House with the Ocean View”.
Presented for the first time in 2002, “The House with the Ocean View” consists of the setting of a three-room house, in which the artist lived for 12 days, in a gallery in New York, subsisting solely on drinking water.
On Tuesday, at a meeting with the press in London, Marina Abramović did not rule out the possibility of, in the coming weeks, spontaneously recreating one of the most emblematic performances, “The Artist is Present”, wrote the Efe agency.
Marina Abramović performed “The Artist is Present” in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sitting at a table, motionless and silent, looking at any visitor who wanted to sit in front of her.
The retrospective exhibition in London ends on January 1, 2024.