A body built out of stone beds and crystal, set down among four centuries of Bellini and Titian.
The Gallerie dell'Accademia has shown Venetian painting to the public since 1817 and has never, in that time, given a living woman a solo exhibition. This season it breaks the run for Marina Abramović, who turns eighty in November. "Transforming Energy," curated by Shai Baitel and running through October 19, coincides with the closing months of the 61st Biennale — and it is not a retrospective in the retiring sense. It is Abramović's own war material, redeployed.
The museum's temporary galleries and its permanent collection both carry the show. Documentation and relics of Imponderabilia, Rhythm 0, Balkan Baroque and Carrying the Skeleton sit against the Renaissance holdings the Accademia was built to protect, with at least one gesture reactivated live rather than simply archived. Interspersed among them are new Transitory Objects — stone beds and crystal-set structures the artist made for visitors to lie on, sit on, or stand beside, in the durational practice she has spent five decades refining into something close to a secular liturgy.
It is a strange match on paper: the museum of Giorgione and Carpaccio hosting an artist whose best-known early work involved a loaded gun on a table and an audience she trusted, or didn't, not to use it. It works because both are, at bottom, interested in the same question — what a body can bear witness to, and for how long. Bellini painted stillness as devotion. Abramović has spent her career performing it as risk.
For a reader already routing an autumn through the Biennale's final weeks, this is worth building the itinerary around rather than in — an early morning at the Accademia, before the crowds move on to the water. The show makes no argument that Abramović belongs among the old masters. It is quieter than that: a museum that has spent two centuries deciding who counts finally letting one more voice, still living, answer the question itself.
— Camille
