The show, presented during the 61st Venice Biennale Arte, runs through Oct. 19 and places Abramović’s work inside both the museum’s permanent collection galleries and temporary exhibition spaces. The Gallerie dell’Accademia exhibition announcement describes the project as a dialogue between past and present, body and spirit, and says visitors are invited to lie, sit or stand on “Transitory Objects” embedded with quartz, amethyst and other materials.
The result is less a conventional retrospective than a public exercise in attention. At a preview, Reuters reported that plaster bones greeted visitors while guides in white coats encouraged them to interact with crystal objects meant to help them “detox from technology.” Abramović told reporters that visitors need time with the work, not a quick walk-through.
A phone-free museum encounter built around presence
The tech-detox element is not a side note. In an interview with The Art Newspaper, Abramović said the public should be “not just a silent witness but an actual participator.” The report said telephones are not permitted inside the exhibition and that visitors are offered headphones to block ambient sound.
That setup turns the museum into a controlled space for silence, duration and physical contact with the work. Curator Shai Baitel has framed the project as a participatory experience, with the visitor’s body completing the artwork rather than merely observing it.
Woman in white dress performing art: the image Venice remembers
The new exhibition also looks back to Abramović’s most searing Venice moment. In 1997, “Balkan Baroque” placed the artist amid a pile of bloodied cow bones, a performance rooted in grief over the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The image of a woman in a white dress performing art while scrubbing bones remains one of the defining documents of her career.
That history is deliberately present in Venice. The exhibition includes references to “Balkan Baroque,” while “Pietà (with Ulay)” from 1983 is shown in dialogue with Titian’s “Pietà,” the Renaissance master’s final painting. Artnet’s earlier report on the Accademia show noted that Abramović’s works would be interspersed with the museum’s Renaissance masterpieces, making the exhibition a direct confrontation between performance art and Venetian patrimony.
That confrontation gives the debut its weight. Abramović is not simply entering an old museum; she is asking one of Venice’s central institutions to treat time, endurance and the human body as seriously as canvas, pigment and stone.
The old works that make the new show feel inevitable
The idea that the audience must complete Abramović’s work has been developing for decades. In a 2001 Sculpture Magazine interview, Abramović described a division in her practice between the “artist body” and the “public body,” explaining that some installations asked viewers to enter a different state and become performers themselves.
That concern became more widely visible in 2010, when MoMA’s “The Artist Is Present” retrospective presented about 50 works spanning more than four decades and included Abramović’s long-duration seated performance with museum visitors. The Venice show extends that logic, but removes the artist as the central physical performer and gives the task of endurance to the public.
The current phone-free framing also has a clear precedent. In a 2014 Creative Time essay, Abramović wrote about exercises that test mind and body, increase awareness of the present moment and respond to a broader public desire for a digital detox. “Transforming Energy” now brings that long-running method into one of Venice’s most historic art settings.
A Biennale-season debut with wider significance
The timing heightens the stakes. The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled “In Minor Keys,” runs May 9 to Nov. 22, with preview days May 6-8 across the Giardini, Arsenale and other locations in Venice. Abramović’s Accademia exhibition opens during that same preview week, positioning it as one of the season’s major institutional events.
For Abramović, who turns 80 this year, “Transforming Energy” is both a milestone and a transfer of responsibility. The show gathers iconic works, mineral-based objects and new Venice-specific juxtapositions, but its central question is direct: Can a distracted public still commit to silence, time and presence?
In that sense, Abramović’s historic Venice debut is not only about honoring a career. It is about testing whether performance art can survive in an age of constant interruption by making the viewer, not the artist, do the hardest work.
