These films, which first featured as part of her 2020 operatic work 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, see Abramovi\u0107 use the plots and casts from operas as a point of departure to freely reimagine dramatic climaxes on the threshold of life\u2019s end, accompanied by Callas\u2019s arias. Snakes, knives, blood, fire, rage, plague and falling from great heights. Time is warped and in slow motion, with each video portraying a female (Abramovi\u0107) and a male counterpart (Willem Dafoe<\/a>) taking turns to play lover, murderer, griever or villain. \u201cIt\u2019s about death, but it\u2019s also about love,\u201d says Tine Vindfield, chief curator at Cisternerne, who finds this series to be particularly pertinent right now at a time when the world is marked by conflict and crisis.<\/p>\n The subterranean, vault-like exhibition space \u2013 once a functional reservoir \u2013 only exacerbates the overwhelming gravity of the piece\u2019s thematics. One film plays after another, requiring the audience to follow each video through the 4,000 square foot space, immersed in total darkness, except for the light of the videos.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIts darkness and resonance creates a space where the work can unfold with greater intensity and the audience becomes physically and emotionally present with each death,\u201d says Abramovi\u0107. The Belgrade-born, New York-based contemporary performance artist asks us to sit with each, to endure the emotional intensity, to register the detail as we witness the approach to the inevitable end.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe sense of time, repetition and grandeur that the work contains unfolds in a completely different way in its encounter with the cisterne,\u201d says Christine Buhl Andersen, CEO of the Frederiksberg Museums, which manages the Cisternerne. \u201cIt\u2019s not a cinema, it\u2019s not an art hall, it\u2019s not an opera house \u2013 but everything meets here in the underground.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The collaboration with Dafoe brings further cinematic dimensions to the project. (In his gold sequin gown, he\u2019s a total belle of the ball.) This is not the first time the pair have collaborated. In 2011, the actor narrated Abramovi\u0107 and Robert Wilson\u2019s theatrical production The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi\u0107.<\/p>\n For Abramovi\u0107, death is not an ending but a repetition we experience again and again. The artist, who in 1988 famously walked 2,500 kilometres across the Great Wall of China over 90 days to conclude a decades-long and turbulent love story of her own, relates this back to her own experiences of sacrifice and pain in love. Be it tragic, unrequited, impossible, all-consuming, forbidden, betrayed \u2013 Seven Deaths is an exploration of the idea that a woman may metaphorically die in love many times over.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn these seven deaths, Abramovi\u0107 highlights how women in classical opera are often portrayed as tragic figures who sacrifice themselves for love,\u201d says Vindfield. \u201cThey are too weak and must face their downfall, or they\u2019re too strong and must be punished.\u201d The repetition of each film draws attention to this pattern, while also inviting us to reflect on how these narratives have shaped cultural ideas about femininity, devotion and suffering.<\/p>\n Abramovi\u0107 first heard the famed opera singer\u2019s angelic voice on the radio in her grandmother\u2019s kitchen as a young girl; the experience stayed with her. \u201cI think Abramovi\u0107 was not only fascinated by the voice, but of course, also by the myth that surrounds this great opera diva,\u201d says Vindfield. \u201cCallas had an extraordinary ability to embody tragic female characters with deep emotional intensity, and Marina Abramovi\u0107 has on her part explored vulnerability, pain and endurance in her work.\u201d<\/p>\n The artist draws parallels between Callas\u2019s life and her own. At the exhibition\u2019s opening, Abramovi\u0107 comedically paraphrased their similarities: \u201cWe both had the same noses, terrible mothers and we\u2019re Sagittariuses.\u201d The real correspondences lie in their conditions for love and emotional intensity, in lives marked by public desire and private loneliness, and in their total devotion to art at a high personal price. For Abramovi\u0107, Callas\u2019s tragic love stories and her tragic death in Paris, aged 53, are an image of the ultimate consequence of love and lust. Having experienced the tumult of heartbreak too, Abramovi\u0107 says she was fortunate to have found salvation in her craft.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Still from Seven Deaths, Marina Abramovi\u0107. Image courtesy the artist<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Still from Seven Deaths, Marina Abramovi\u0107. Image courtesy the artist<\/p>\n
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Installation image, Marina Abramovi\u0107: Seven Deaths, Cisternerne, CopenhagenPhotography by David Stjernholm<\/p>\n