With thousands of strangers and Marina Abramovic, I inhale and exhale. Again.
The world’s most famous – and most controversial – performance artist sits on the stage looking down at us, dressed in white, her Rapunzel hair falling over one shoulder, her nails painted red with blood. “I always ask for the most uncomfortable chair,” she said before sliding onto the stage. “It keeps me alert.”
The room is silent. “Breathe,” she says with the quiet authority of someone who has tested her body’s limits for decades. “Exhale.” Frequently. A total of twelve times.
My mind is racing. We are at the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2026 to hear Marina talk about the history of performing arts. The artist, now 79, has built her career on stamina — her own, and sometimes ours.
In the conversation, which is based on several video clips, there are moments when I, along with other audience members next to me, cover my eyes or look away. Marina says, “When you start performing you are like a child walking into unknown territory. At first I had to figure out what the limits of my physical body were.” She adds, “Suffering. Mortality. Fear of pain. These are the three things that people are afraid of. Every kind of art is related to this. I want to show the public, I am the mirror. If I can do that, create pain and be free from pain, then you can do it yourself.”
She adds, “Art has a lot to do these days, especially in the society we live in… I don’t believe art can change the world, but art can point to problems, and ask the right questions.” She adds, “Being an artist means being able to give up everything. And it’s a very lonely life.”
Just an hour earlier, at the press conference, a nervous young artist, her face smeared with white powder, accused Marina of being in the Epstein files. The room became tensely silent.
Marina looked at him with quiet curiosity. “Are you talking about eating children?”
The young artist’s hands were shaking so much that he had to steady the microphone with both. “I’m talking about art as a means of control,” she said. “Why do you let people control you? You’re an artist, not a Satanist.”
Marina, with the calmness of someone long accustomed to controversy, replied, “You make too many mistakes in accusing me… It is very dangerous for me. And there is no truth in it.”
He described how his spirit cooking dinner performance poem was misread as a Satanic ritual, then woven into a conspiracy theory fueled by rumor and misinformation coinciding with Lady Gaga’s visit to her show at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Marina Abramovic | Photo Courtesy: Gayatri Nair
After all, this is the artist who once stood motionless for six hours while strangers cut off his skin and pointed a loaded gun at his head; who died inside a burning five-pointed star; Who spent four days scrubbing bloody cow bones at the Venice Biennale.
You expect intensity. Hers is a lazy, self-confident type. She leans back and smiles. “I am here now. With you. The only thing in our life is presence. I teach presence.”
She looks away as the audience begins to wander around asking increasingly intellectual questions. “Is there a fun question here?” she asks. “I like telling jokes. I haven’t heard any Indian jokes.”
At a biennial rich in performance art, Marina reigns supreme, courtesy of curator Nikhil Chopra.
In the nearby Island Warehouse, his massive video installation depicts 108 Tibetan monks and nuns chanting the Heart Sutra. In the humid heat of Kochi, the mantras overwhelm you. “It took me five years,” says Marina. “When I heard different monasteries and different traditions coming together, it was like a waterfall.”
Although her two-hour talk, which attracted artists, collectors and fans from across the country, was a comprehensive class on performance art, Marina is most fascinating when she goes off script. The highlight of the evening are the pieces she shows with her longtime partner and collaborator, German performance artist Ule (Frank Uwe Lessiepen).
The sound stops as she plays a clip of them both screaming into each other’s mouth. “Oh my God. Sound is so important,” she says, “I could scream now, but I don’t want to scream.” Then, she screams. As the audience sits in amazement, she smiles, “That’s enough.” Another clip has emerged in which he and Ule are exhibiting imponderabilia at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. “I’m sorry we’re naked,” she says with a shrug, “but it was the seventies.”
Earlier that evening, while discussing his quest to overcome pain, he had said, “Physical pain is easy to understand and feel. I don’t even come close to emotional pain. Emotions are much harder.” It makes it easy to understand why his now-viral performance at MoMA in 2010, The Artist Is Present, had as much of an impact on him as it did on audiences.
“I saw through 1,560 eyes. People waited for hours, sleeping outside the museum, to see me. I was 65 then, and I could never have done that when I was younger. I didn’t have the knowledge or the concentration.” Uley famously sat in front of him during this performance. “After three months I stood up from that chair, and I knew I was different.”
Discussing the importance of teaching, Marina says, “Performing art is a living form. To be a living art form it must be preserved.” Hence his Marina Abramovic Institute in Greece, which is predictably serious. She says, “We take your telephone, computer and monitor you for a week. We give you only water and tea with a touch of honey. No food. We make you count grains of rice for hours and hours so you can really understand timing and concentration.”
“It’s really important that you’re delicate and strong. It’s the hardest form of art. It’s all about emotions. Art has to touch your gut and your heart.”
This is also the thing that keeps him moving forward. “I’m turning 80 this year. I have shows booked till 2032. I’m not stopping at all… I don’t know where this energy comes from. Making art is as strong as breathing. If you stop breathing, you die. If you look at my generation, half started repeating themselves, half stopped breathing.”