Marina Abramović becomes Honorary Academician of Carrara. She will give online lectio on June 23

After Antonio Canova and John Flaxman at the beginning of its history, and, more recently, after Maurizio Cattelan (2018) and Jeff Koons (2019), theAcademy of Fine Arts of Carrara has a new entry among its Academicians of Honor: it is Marina Abramović, the great Serbian artist “godmother” of performance art. The Honorary Academician ceremony, organized on the occasion of the opening of the 2020-2021 academic year, will take place on June 23, 2021, at 6 p.m., in a mixed mode. While Director Luciano Massari, President Antonio Passa, Academic Council faculty and students will be present in the Academy’s Aula Magna, Marina Abramović will deliver her lectio magistralis from New York live online.

Instead, the laudatio will be given by Fabio Cavallucci, a curator and art critic, former director of several international institutions, who has long paid close attention to performance and related phenomena. The set and directing organization is by director Carmine Fornari with technical support from Professor Elmar Giacummo. The artist, after giving the lectio magistralis, will be available to answer students’ questions.

“This is the first time in the history of the Academy that this honor is awarded to a woman,” emphasizes Director Massari. “The Academy was founded 250 years ago at the behest of Maria Teresa Cybo-Malaspina, and through the work of two other sovereigns, Elisa Bonaparte and Maria Beatrice D’Este, it has achieved fame and development, so women have been central in our history but still there had not been an initiative in this sense and this will be the first of a long series.”

“”Marina Abramović,“ adds President Passa,” is one of the most important artists in the world. We are proud that an artist who is the benchmark for Behavioral Art is joining our Academy. Her work has influenced young artists and institutions, universities and academies of fine arts by exerting a decisive influence on models of inquiry in artistic practice."

Marina Abramović was chosen for her high merits in the field of art, as the creator of research carried out primarily on herself that aims to take the body and mind to extreme limits, but also skilled in crossing contemporary languages, which has expanded the boundaries of the arts thus bringing them closer to life.

Born in Belgrade to parents who were both officers in the Yugoslav army, moving first to Amsterdam and then to New York, Marina Abramović entered art history as early as the early 1970s with performances that tested her body with heat, ice, or the risk of being injured by the audience with objects she herself had provided. From 1976 to 1988 she mostly collaborated with the German Ulay, a partner in life as well, making paired works that challenge physical and psychic endurance. In 1997, with Balkan Baroque, a performance in which for four days the artist cleans ox bones in a mephitic atmosphere in a room in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, she won the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale. Having moved to New York in the middle of the first decade of this century, with Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim (2005), a reenactment of historical performances by other artists, and then with The Artist Is Present at MoMA (2010), in addition to gaining the greatest attention and recognition from the art world she became a public phenomenon, among the few artists in the world to have a visibility that transcends the boundaries of the art world to be celebrated now as a popular star.

Photo: Marina Abramović" frame from Body of Truth (2019) © Indi Film

Marina Abramović becomes Honorary Academician of Carrara. She will give online lectio on June 23

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