Marina Abramovic: Holding Emptiness

Holding Emptiness, a retrospective covering her work since the mid-1970s, is Marina Abramovic's first exhibition in a Spanish museum in a decade. Curated by Fernando Francés, the show, which will remain open to the public through August 31st at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, invites viewers to interact with Abramovic's works by means of the sensations experienced with some of the objects on exhibit. The retrospective features photographs, videos, "transitory objects" and a selection of 30 drawings, taken from 30 notebooks from the artist's travels in Brazil in the 1990s, recently found in Abramovic's archives. Meanwhile, the videos capture simple actions that Abramovic carries out in front of the camera and without a live audience. The artist barely moves, poses her hands on an urn containing scientist Nicola Tesla's ashes in an attempt to absorb her energy in Tesla Urn (2003) or on a ceramic skull in Vanitas, from the series Kitchen, Homage to Saint Therese (2009). In Self Portrait, based on her video Nude With Skeleton (2002-2013), she appears lying on the ground with a skeleton on top, life and death together, a reflection on temporality and death, themes that recur in her oeuvre. Marina Abramovic is a precursor of Performance Art and throughout her career she has taken her artistic concerns to extremes, experimenting with methods, techniques, and instruments in order to communicate her art to the viewer.