Upon entering the atrium of Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, I hear an angelic voice belting operatic tones, but cannot identify its origin. As I weave through the crowd, a familiar smell wafts through the atmosphere; organic, starchy, and sweet. In the centre of the dimly lit ingress, a large, round table is flooded with light. Around it sit a dozen people, diligently peeling potatoes.
In endeavouring to write an article about Marina Abramović’s Institute Takeover and what it is like to experience long durational performance art, it quickly becomes apparent to me that, to a certain extent, this venture may be futile. Performance art is not meant to be written or read about; it is meant to be experienced.
For this particular installation, Abromavić has described the audience’s direct participation as “essential. They’re not voyeurs looking at the work, they are active participants and there is a transition and transformation of the energy,” redefining what it means to be an observer.
In this spirit, I plop myself down at an empty chair and grab a potato. Across is sat Aleksandar Timotic, a Hessen-based Serbian performance artist whose installation, Are You Hungry? engages in the collective consummation of a love language and how it looks, feels, and sounds. Timotic, a trained opera singer, finds immense inspiration in his Balkan heritage as well as from personal experiences.
First of all, I am taken aback at how dirty the potatoes are. It is as though they have just been ripped from the ground. There is so much dirt that I can hardly tell if the potato has been peeled or not. I turn it round and round in my hand, and simultaneously inside my mind. I encounter questions of cleanliness, readiness, and nakedness.
Some people struggle with the steel peeler, a robust apparatus that says MADE IN GERMANY. The blade rotates delicately on its hinges, constantly adjusting to the irregular topography of each tuber. People chat. Someone is humming softly. We share our labour.
I peel with urgency, preoccupied with practical queries, such as: What are these potatoes for? Why are they so dirty? What even constitutes a peeled potato?
Timotic, on the other hand, peels almost excruciatingly slowly. He examines each peel, both fiercely present and equally detached from such trivial concerns. He has a small pairing knife, with which he lightly pierces each new potato from the mountainous pile, a smooth and fluid gesture that looks as though it has been seared into his muscle memory.
Every so often, he stops, rises to stand on his chair, and commences to sing. A resounding voice that is charged and remedial. He is our potato patriarch, our silent (singing) leader, our operatic apostle. Timotic trained with Abramović under MAI, the Marina Abromović Institute, in the mountains in Greece, where he says he learned everything he knows about performance art.
The MAI process challenges students physically and mentally with exercises like fasting, not speaking, and counting grains of rice for up to five hours on end.
“I was thinking there is no way that I can do this,” he explains, “and then I discovered actually that I can do this! When we challenge ourselves we discover [more] about ourselves,” adding that Abramović “definitely left a mark on my work.”
Abramović references performance as a ceremony. She cites energy and presence as paths to liberating oneself from materiality. Through exercises of deprivation, sensory or otherwise, the body relinquishes control, imparting energy either on another performer, the audience, or both.
Timotic asserts that “You can’t make good art in one day. It’s practice. It takes time, patience. With every art form, the most important thing is patience, because nothing happens overnight.”
Two small piles of splintered skins and smooth spuds accumulate in front of me, indicating that time has passed. The potatoes are my clock. I have become lost in the potatoes. I stop wondering what they are for; it does not matter. It never mattered.
The Takeover employs the entire two-story building and its stages, vestibules, and hallways. It is a maze; one could easily get lost within its long corridors (and I do). In this way, the performance does not stop and start, but rather envelopes every inch of the space. As I explore, I feel that there is not a correct path or pace. For even when I find nothing, the anticipation of what might be around each corner feels like something.
text
Before I can see Paul Setúbal, I can hear him. His performance, The Passage, navigates a space of transition, where energy is constantly arriving and escaping. The forceful whipping of his rubber police baton leaves cursory skid marks on the stark, white foyer walls. The sound is deafening and becomes louder and louder, echoing violently like gunshots. Dressed in black and fully masked, I struggle to associate him with the gentle, personable man I spoke to just one day earlier – but the performance is him, not a character and not an act.
The Brazil-based artist assures me that he is “never acting,” asserting the critical distinction between performance art and theatre. He talks about how much physical mental preparation is involved in what may look like a simple exercise, explaining that “people think performance is an easy work of art – because you only see the action. There is so much behind the action, which is perhaps why the documentation is so necessary.”
The documentation of The Passage can be read twofold. Because the performance leaves behind visible marks, or etchings, a consequential artwork is created on the whiplashed wall. “[Documentation] is another kind of way to make a connection, but what matters is the present,” he explains, adding that “the most important is for the people to feel what I am doing, in order to have some kind of cathartic experience.”
Setúbal has been a member of the Brazilian art collective Grupo EmpreZa for thirteen years. The urban collective performs not only within museums and galleries, but also on city streets, public buses, and other non-conventional spaces to access what he calls “a different kind of public.”
The unmitigated use of space is a unique opportunity for the audience, essentially eliminating the perennial fourth wall1invisible barrier between the performer and viewer inherent to theatre, which otherwise prevents communication and exchange.
Instead, MAI facilitates what Setúbal describes as a “living space. It’s not just a stage where you come and sit and watch and then leave. Every different work is vibrating in the space. People have to find the vibrations and emotions. You have to walk, to discover, and that’s a very different kind of experience. I think this is beautiful.”
The meandering space eventually leads me back to the lobby. Between the lingering smell of potatoes and the myriad of performative encounters, I collapse onto the padded bench. A small group of sprites sits down at the adjoining settee, looking me straight in the eyes. Their faces are painted like daisies, a cheerful yellow pistil on each of their noses.
“Pick a number!”, they all say together, and proceed to narrate a tortuous personal narrative, filled with tenderness and agony, family drama and heartbreak. Each performer delivers it in unison. The monologue ends with “floating away into nothingness on your velvet couch,” and suddenly the story is over. They look at me in silence and I burst out laughing, a compulsory reaction that cannot be helped.
The group is led by Carla Adra, a Paris-based artist whose performance The Office of Tears is perhaps the most directly confronting, at least corporeally. Comprising over two-hundred true stories collected from former visitors, the performers draw on a catalogue of sad or painful accounts, each designated with a number. The stories are recited, verbatim, via blue tooth earbuds.
If I didn’t already know, there would be no indication that Adra is the leader. The clique of six functions utterly in tandem with one another, and seem to be connected by an invisible string. When asked how she conducts herself as a leader, Adra attributes cultivating bonds of trust with her co-performers and “giving them confidence to take their own time” to make decisions during the performance.
“Everyone is kind of autonomous, but we are linked by the sound. I also ask them to make sure to consider the audience as a person and always to be themselves.”
I become invested, not only in these six strangers, but in the absent body from whom the anecdote originated. Adra’s practice continually empowers not only the collective narrative, but also that of the other, and in this particular performance, the element of chance encounter. For her, the practice entails “creating groups around people and channels for other peoples’ stories and experiences.”
If I could describe my experience, I might try to illustrate the feeling of time stopping, or weight vanishing, both of which cannot be captured in video. What these sensations share is a quality of being both intangible and viscerally palpable. Abramović speaks about performance as akin to meditation, as she emphasises being present, awake, and still.
“We’re always moving,” she says, “we’re always doing things. We can never be still. When you are in stillness, an entire part of the world opens to you, which is invisible.”
Much like the way eye contact is impossible over a computer screen, the momentism2the belief that the only way to reach the status quo is to pause time itself inherent to performance art simply cannot be filmed or even really described. As soon as it is labeled by a word or captured in an image, its essence has been removed, like skimmed milk – but when it does happen, you will know.
Performances by Aleksandar Timotic, Carla Adra, Carlos Martiel, Cassils, Collective Absentia, Despina Zacharopoulou, Miles Greenberg, Paul Setúbal, Paula Garcia, Sandra Johnston, Yiannis Pappas and THE PUBLIC!
Coinciding with the Takeover, Southbank Centre hosted a symposium with the artist titled Marina Abromović, a Visual Biography, which can be watched in its entirety here
The Takeover is part of a London-wide celebration of the artist’s 50 year career, and coincides with 7 Deaths of Maria Callas at the English National Opera as well as a retrospective at the Royal Academy in what is the institution’s first ever retrospective of a female artist in its over 250-year history.
Marina Abramović Takeover is on view from 4 – 8 October, 2023 at
Southbank Centre
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Belvedere Rd, London SE1 8XX
More info here
