‘My Professional Return to Belgrade Is a Big Deal for Me’: Marina Abramović Writes a Deeply Personal Letter to Serbia Ahead of Her Retrospective

The performance artist Marina Abramović’s return to Belgrade is,
in her own words, a big deal. Not only is the city her hometown,
but it has been more than four decades since she had a solo show
there, and that was back when it what was the capital of former
Yugoslavia. It’s the place where she discovered how to make art
that could break all the rules, and where she says she now wants to
inspire other younger artists to do the same.

Perhaps because of time since she left aged 29, the
world-renowned artist published an open letter on July 26 in the
Serbian weekly Nedeljnik to reintroduce
herself to her home city. The personal note, signed “with love,
Marina,” starts off with a memory from her youth in Belgrade when
she was first becoming an artist.

“I watched [clouds] often while lying on the grass, and one day
my observation was suddenly interrupted by planes, which appeared
out of nowhere and left a beautiful pattern in the sky,” she
writes. “At that moment, I realized that everything could be used
to create, and that there was no reason to limit myself to studio
painting.”

The artist’s retrospective, which is called “The Cleaner,” has
been on an extensive European tour since 2017, but its finale in
Belgrade will be extra special. “My professional return to
Belgrade is a big deal for me,” Abramović writes. She says
that it is the most exciting show since her exhibition at MoMA,
“The Artist Is Present” in 2010.

Organized by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, “The Cleaner” traveled
first to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, near
Copenhagen in Denmark, where she and her former partner Ulay were
reconciled. The exhibition went next to the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn,
and is now on show at CoCA in Toruń, Poland. (In Poland, the
exhibition received a mixed reception, with some religious
opponents protesting and praying
on-site, claiming the artist worships the devil.)

In Belgrade, where the exhibition is due to open in September
and run until January 2020, the show will be at its largest. It
will also be the most significant to her personally, she says. “I
only came back to visit family. I last exhibited here on my own 45
years ago. Now, almost half a century later, I want to show,
especially to the new generation, what I’ve been doing all these
years.”

Invited by Serbia’s Prime Minister

In 2018, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Serbia, Ana
Brnabić, personally invited Abramović to bring the show to Serbia,
according to Still in
Belgrade. The exhibition is being seen as a symbol of the
government’s new cultural policy, which is hoping to reach out to
youth, and gain Serbia more attention on the international
scene.

Abramović has not always spoken highly of the 29 years she spent
growing up in what was then Yugoslavia. “I come from a dark place,”
she wrote in the opening of her 2016 memoir, Walk Through
Walls, recalling the communist era under leader Josip Tito.
“Perpetual shortages of everything, drabness everywhere. There is
something about communism and socialism—it’s a kind of aesthetic
based on pure ugliness.” She left in 1975 to move to Amsterdam, the
same year she had her last solo show in Belgrade.

The main purpose of the Serbian edition of “The Cleaner” is,
according to Abramović, to inspire young people from the art world
and beyond. “If I had been paying attention to what was
written about me and my performances in the 1970s, I do not believe
that I would want to leave the house at all, much less move on,”
she says. “Only when you make a mistake [it] means you are doing
something new and experimenting.” She stresses the importance of
sharing this message with young people who may be facing similar
challenges. “In the end, only when you go through a series of
failures and create your own path can you accomplish what you
envisioned,” she writes.

Marina Abramović’s “The Cleaner” will be on view at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, from September 21, 2019
through January 20, 2020.

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for Me’: Marina Abramović Writes a Deeply Personal Letter to Serbia
Ahead of Her Retrospective appeared first on artnet
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