Marina Abramović: Mindful immateriality
At the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Marina Abramović’s long-awaited exhibition Private Archaeology showcases video documentation of her early works alongside more recent projects. It is not a retrospective, as such, but charts the theme of consciousness – its expansion and contraction – in the artist’s work. Most people are familiar with the Abramović legend. Her early works involving pain and duration were quickly canonised into the history of the avant-garde, then her 2005 exhibition 7 Easy Pieces at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which included her performance The Artist is Present, repositioned her as a formidable player in the current debates around performance art, its theory and criticism.