The language of the body

At the 2002 Venice Biennale, a large building in the Arsenale was dedicated to the students of the Belgrade School of Performing Arts, led by Marina Abramović. At the time, she had already received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and had begun to take the theme of her artistic legacy very seriously. It was early afternoon when I approached the entrance and, from the threshold, I sensed that a deep space was unfolding inside, where things were happening. There was only one way to enter: you had to climb a few wooden steps and reach a sort of booth that reminded me of old circus ticket offices. A wooden sign read in red letters: “First Kiss.” Inside the booth was a young artist, separated from the audience by a glass panel smudged with fingerprints and featuring a large oval opening in front. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Only when I got closer did she rise from the stool where she had been sitting in wait, put on her lipstick, and moved to the opening to look at me. Then I understood: before entering… a kiss.

According to Marina Abramović, the body that becomes a work of art is always and only the artist’s own body. Her body is never political, social, or activist—except through the eyes of the audience. And the audience cannot be mere spectators; they are always called upon to be bodies too. Sometimes challenged, provoked, seduced, her audience remains free to choose how to experience this encounter—whatever body, whatever gaze that relationship may generate. Between Breath and Fire is the exhibition by Marina Abramović hosted in the Gres Art 671 space in Bergamo, between autumn 2024 and winter 2025. A show that truly “took your breath away” for its ability to narrate a life and a body of work, standing—just as the title suggests—between two elements that, when combined, can be deadly. The sense of the limit, of existing within it, has always been a key area of exploration for the artist—and inevitably, for her audience as well, offered not as imposition but as invitation. Follow me, if you will.

Through a seamless and fluid experience with no physical interruptions, the exhibition invited visitors to move freely through four thematic sections that at times felt like biblical warnings: Breath, Body, Other, and Death. These were the words one needed to know to enter the exhibition with clarity, without excess or useless adjectives, just as she has taught and trained us to do over the years. Straight to the point. The risks are hers to manage—and, if necessary, to bear. Ours is the responsibility to take part. Watching is not enough.

Karol Winiarczyk’s curatorship was rightly described as impeccable. The entire exhibition was conceived as a single installation-relationship between the visitor’s body and hers—whether on a moving screen, large or small, or in a still image. The feeling of sharing was both physical and metaphysical: her breath could become yours, her dance step an invitation to move together, her gaze fixed on you, yours on her. From screen to mirror—because her magic, the expression of so many years of artistic life, was a tangible and constant presence in the space.

Almost without realizing it, the experience unfolded like a retrospective, combining both historical and recent works—all incredibly necessary and coherent—offering a reflection on energy, solitude, myth, death, loss, pain, and the archetype. Of the body. Always through her body, which becomes language and speech, the measure of everything, place, motive, and occasion. In this space between breath and fire, one departs and arrives at a request for awareness: the body is physical and emotional energy, it is the limit and the desire to go beyond, it is extreme fatigue, repetition, pain, cry, sound, song, silence. It is an aesthetic act that constantly tries to balance the tension between control and vulnerability. The journey can only end with death—the only, ultimate performative act. But if the death of the body is so pure and total, why experience it only once? And why only as oneself and not also as someone else, someone one has studied and admired for a long time? Seven Deaths (2020–21) is the work that closes the exhibition: a magnificently executed video piece in which the artist becomes the heroine destined to die seven times in seven different ways, interpreting seven operatic performances by Maria Callas, her great love. In the end, then, it tastes like a long-held desire finally fulfilled.