On May 6, 2026, a threshold was crossed in one of Europe’s most consequential institutions of Western art. The Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, custodian of the Veneto’s Renaissance and Byzantine inheritance, opened its permanent collection galleries and temporary exhibition spaces to Marina Abramović—the first time in the museum’s history that a living woman artist has been the subject of a dedicated exhibition. Transforming Energy, curated by Shai Baitel, Artistic Director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, runs through October 19, 2026, coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale Arte and marking Abramović’s eightieth birthday. The exhibition is an institutional event of the first order, but it is also an aesthetic and philosophical proposition: that the body of the performer, the body of the visitor, and the body of the painted figure share a continuous lineage of inquiry and that the Accademia’s permanent collection is sufficiently elastic and sufficiently alive to host that lineage as living inquiry rather than as commemoration.
A Long-Deferred First
The framing of “first living woman artist” is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a precise institutional fact, and its precision deserves examination. The Accademia has recently made contemporary art a substantive part of its biennial-aligned program. Director Giulio Manieri Elia has overseen exhibitions by Mario Merz, Philip Guston, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, and Willem de Kooning—an unbroken sequence of men, each engaged primarily with painting or with painterly sculpture. To insert Abramović into this lineage is to insert performance, durational practice, and the politically charged figure of the woman’s body into a register that has been overwhelmingly oriented toward the male hand and the modernist canvas.
The choice resonates with another Venetian milestone: Abramović became the first woman to receive the Golden Lion at the Biennale in 1997 for Balkan Baroque, a performance that has since been understood as a watershed in the institutionalization of body-based practice. Twenty-nine years later, the Accademia’s invitation closes a long curve. Abramović herself has framed the moment in autobiographical terms, recounting an early train journey from Belgrade with her mother at age fourteen, when she emerged from the station and wept at her first sight of the city—a memory that has informed her return through every subsequent decade.
For collectors and researchers, the institutional point matters because it materially changes the trajectory of an artist’s market and historiography. A solo exhibition embedded in a national collection—Italy’s Ministry of Culture is the principal partner—and circulating subsequently to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome generates the kind of scholarship and museum provenance that anchors long-term valuation. Italian Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli framed the project as a national tribute, and the involvement of the Ministero della Cultura and its Dipartimento per la Valorizzazione Culturale gives the show the weight of state patrimony.
A Curatorial Architecture
Shai Baitel’s curatorial intervention is structural rather than supplementary. Rather than confining Abramović to a discrete contemporary wing, the exhibition disperses works across both the Accademia’s temporary exhibition spaces and its permanent collection galleries, allowing the artist’s practice to inhabit the rooms ordinarily reserved for Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian. “Placing Marina Abramović’s work within the permanent collection brings past and present into direct dialogue,” Baitel has said, and “invites audiences to inhabit that space with their own bodies.” The verb is exact: inhabit, not view.
For researchers attentive to museological strategy, the gesture warrants close study. The Accademia’s permanent collection is not a neutral display; it is a curated argument about the nature of Western image-making from the late Gothic to the eighteenth century, an argument grounded in altarpieces, allegorical compositions, and the rhetorical organization of the human figure. To place Abramović’s Transitory Objects—stone beds, crystalline assemblages, mineral-embedded structures—among these works is to propose that the proto-modern Venetian project of organizing matter into spiritual signification finds its contemporary continuation in performance, not solely in painting. The exhibition implicitly argues that the Venetian Renaissance and the durational performance tradition share an underlying commitment: the use of bodies and materials as conductors of meaning.
The Body as Conductor: Transitory Objects and Energy Transmission
At the center of Transforming Energy is a category of work Abramović has developed over four decades: the Transitory Object. These are interactive sculptures, often combining stone, wood, copper, quartz, amethyst, and other minerals, on which visitors are invited to lie, sit, or stand. Abramović describes the experience as “energy transmission”—a phrase that may register as esoteric to those unfamiliar with her vocabulary, but which acquires precision when read alongside the work itself. The Transitory Objects function as designed instruments of attention. They impose a posture; the posture demands stillness; the stillness exposes the body to its own sensations and to the slow time of mineral contact.
The phenomenology at work is more rigorous than the language sometimes suggests. By introducing the visitor’s body as a constitutive medium, Abramović performs a category shift familiar from the experimental aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s, but at a museum scale and within an unmistakably canonical setting. The viewer becomes a participant; the participant becomes, briefly, a performer; the performer becomes part of the work’s continuing duration. For an institution whose entire architecture presumes the viewer as a quiet observer of finished objects, the implications are substantial. The Accademia’s gilt frames and didactic panels do not disappear; they remain in counterpoint, productively at odds with the kinaesthetic register the artist demands.
Marina Abramović: Iconic Works Recontextualized
Transforming Energy is also a retrospective in the substantive sense, restaging documentation of foundational performances—Imponderabilia (1977), Rhythm 0 (1974), Light/Dark (1977), Balkan Baroque (1997), and Carrying the Skeleton (2008)—alongside new works conceived for the Venetian context. Each of these earlier pieces is by now a touchstone in the historiography of performance. Rhythm 0, in which Abramović placed seventy-two objects on a table and offered her body to the audience for six hours, is routinely cited as the canonical text on consent, vulnerability, and the limits of spectatorship. Imponderabilia, in which Abramović and Ulay stood unclothed in a narrow doorway, forcing visitors to pass between them, recoded the museum threshold as a site of erotic and ethical decision. Carrying the skeleton brought mortality into direct physical contact with the artist’s torso.
To encounter these works as projections and documentary traces within the Accademia is to confront a question central to the discipline: what is the relationship between performance and its archive? The exhibition does not pretend to resolve the question, but it stages it deliberately. The documentation is presented not as a substitute for the live event but as one of the work’s legitimate afterlives, in conversation with the transitory objects (which propose presence) and the new commissions (which propose continuation). The arrangement implicitly rejects the binary between “liveness” and “documentation” that has structured so much performance scholarship since Peggy Phelan, treating the archive as an ongoing performative field rather than as a residue.
Pietà in Dialogue: A 450-Year Conversation
The exhibition’s most concentrated curatorial gesture, and the one most likely to enter art historical literature, is the pairing of Abramović and Ulay’s Pietà (with Ulay) (1983) with Titian’s Pietà (c. 1575–76), the painter’s final, unfinished work, completed posthumously by Palma Giovane. The year 2026 marks the 450th anniversary of Titian’s Pietà, and the placement is neither incidental nor decorative: it honors Titian while recasting the performative pietà tradition that Abramović and Ulay extracted from Christian iconography.
In the 1983 photographic and performative Pietà, the typology of the Marian lamentation is restaged with the artist herself in the position of the grieving figure, holding her then-partner’s body in a tableau that recalls the diagonal compositions of Renaissance precedents. Placing this work in direct conversation with Titian’s late painting—a work suffused with the painter’s own intimation of mortality—activates a layered reading. Titian’s Pietà, with its rough, almost mural-like surface and its complicated authorship, is itself a meditation on the limits of representation in the face of death. Abramović and Ulay’s Pietà is a meditation on the limits of partnership and presence. Together they constitute a 450-year dialogue on grief, transcendence, and redemption registered through the human body.
For researchers, the pairing is generative beyond its symbolic appeal. It tests a thesis—that Renaissance typologies of suffering survive in contemporary performance not as quotations but as continuous structural concerns—and offers a primary visual document for that thesis at scale. It is the sort of curatorial provocation that one expects to see cited in monographs and dissertations for years to come.
There is also a methodological point worth flagging. The Accademia’s decision to lend a canonical late Titian to a contemporary curatorial program is the kind of institutional permission that has, until recently, been rare in Italian state museums. The conditions for such a pairing presume a level of curatorial trust—and a level of conservation confidence—that signals a maturing relationship between Italy’s national collections and the contemporary field. Whether this becomes a template for other Italian institutions remains to be seen, but the precedent has now been set in a building whose authority is difficult to question.
Venice and the Materials of Transformation
Venice’s particular history makes it a peculiarly apt host for this project. The city was, for centuries, the principal Mediterranean entrepôt for the trade in precious stones, pigments, dyes, and glass. Its mosaicists at San Marco worked in tesserae imported from across the Byzantine world; its Renaissance painters were unusually attuned to material innovation. Abramović’s use of quartz, amethyst, and other mineral elements thus reads not as exoticism but as continuity. The Venetian Renaissance pursued, through pigment and glass, a metaphysical transformation of matter into image; Abramović pursues, through mineral contact and durational attention, a transformation of bodily sensation into awareness.
By placing the visitor’s own body at the center of the work, the exhibition invites a durational form of looking—one less about passive observation than about presence, participation, and the possibility of inner change. The proposition is sober rather than mystical. It asks that the museum, for the duration of one’s passage through it, be treated not as a repository of objects but as a site of practice.
The Digital Twin: TAEX and the Avatar
Running parallel to the sculptural and performative components of the exhibition is a substantial digital program developed in collaboration with TAEX, a London-based platform for contemporary new media art. The TAEX contribution comprises six moving image works featuring a newly developed digital avatar of Abramović—a lifelike digital twin of the artist at the age of sixty, created in 2025 and designed to enact, indefinitely, exercises drawn from the Marina Abramović method.
The avatar is not a marketing flourish. It represents a substantive shift in how performance can be archived, expanded, and transmitted. The collaboration began with the exhibition’s first iteration at MAM Shanghai, where Abramović introduced her first series of digital avatars as experimental, meditative extensions of her own presence. In Venice, the avatars have been refined into instruments of pedagogy as much as of representation. They introduce visitors to the principles of the method through sustained, embodied demonstration—a digital didactic that is itself a meditation on duration.
The most prominent of these works is Slow Walking, a thirty-meter projection environment that immerses the visitor in a durational experience of movement and stillness. The piece is derived from a foundational exercise of the Marina Abramović Institute: walking at an almost imperceptible pace, dissolving the boundaries between body, time, and awareness. The exercise is, in the artist’s framing, a counterpractice to a culture that “glorifies multitasking and acceleration.” Realized at architectural scale and inhabited by the artist’s digital double, the work asks the visitor to enter a slower temporality—one calibrated not to clock time but to attentional time.
Interwoven among the sculptural installations are five smaller digital exercises, displayed on screens that accompany particular installations: Pyramid Portal B, Opening and Closing of Door, Wounded Geode B, Color Screen, and As Slow As Possible. Each pairs the avatar with an exercise from the method, offering what TAEX describes as guidance, encounter, and reflection. For collectors of digital art, these works mark a significant development in the discourse around AI- and avatar-mediated performance, and they are likely to anchor scholarship on Abramović’s late-career engagement with the digital.
Stakes for the Field: Performance Beyond the Archive
For art historians and curators considering the futures of performance, the avatar program advances a question that has occupied the field since the early documentation debates of the 1970s. If performance is by definition durational and embodied, how is it transmitted across time once the artist is no longer able—or no longer alive—to perform it? The traditional answers have included re-performance, photographic and video archives, written scores, and institutional protocols of the kind Abramović herself codified at the Marina Abramović Institute. The avatar represents a new term in this series: a non-biological body capable of indefinite repetition, capable of guiding initiation into the Method without the artist’s physical presence.
The implications are simultaneously generative and disquieting, and the exhibition does not seek to settle the debate. What it does is to make the proposition visible and habitable. TAEX, which positions itself at the forefront of digital art discourse and collaborates with institutions including Art Basel, presents programming during the Venice Biennale, and participates in major global art fairs including Untitled, Paris Photo, and Art SG, has produced a credible technical and curatorial vehicle for the proposition. The result is that questions of authenticity, replicability, and the ontology of performance—long discussed in seminars—now have a public, exhibition-grade test case at a national institution.
The choice to render the avatar at age sixty rather than at the artist’s current age is itself worth a paragraph of scholarly attention. It locates the digital double at a generative midpoint in Abramović’s career—after the foundational performances of the 1970s and the partnership with Ulay, but before the period in which her practice became inseparable from her institutional persona. The avatar is, in this sense, a curated self: a body chosen for its capacity to teach, not for its capacity to commemorate. That decision suggests the artist understands the digital twin as a pedagogical instrument first and a memorial second, and it positions the works as instruments of method transmission rather than as nostalgic objects.
Market and Provenance Considerations
For collectors, several features of Transforming Energy warrant careful attention. First, the exhibition is co-organized with the Marina Abramović Institute and the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, with significant Italian state involvement. The provenance trajectory of works exhibited—particularly new commissions—will be unusually robust.
Second, the exhibition’s pairing with Titian establishes a museological precedent that will inform future scholarship and, by extension, secondary-market valuations of Abramović’s photographic, performative, and object-based work from the Ulay period. The 1983 Pietà in particular gains an institutional citation of considerable weight.
Third, the TAEX digital works occupy a category that the secondary market is still in the process of pricing. Avatar-based moving image works, particularly those tied to institutional commissions and developed in collaboration with a recognized platform, represent an emerging asset class whose contours will be shaped by precisely the kind of exhibition Transforming Energy provides. Collectors building positions in digital and new media art should treat the show as a benchmark presentation.
Fourth, the announced continuation in Rome at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea signals a touring trajectory that extends the institutional footprint of the body of work on view and provides additional scholarly occasion for placement and reassessment. The Italian state’s commitment to a two-city presentation suggests, further, that this is being treated as a definitive late-career articulation.
The Visitor as Co-Author
What ultimately distinguishes Transforming Energy from a conventional retrospective is its insistence on the visitor’s agency. The transitory objects require contact. The avatar exercises invite imitation. Slow Walking demands a temporal commitment that exceeds the museum’s habitual pacing. Even the Pietà pairing, by virtue of its placement, asks the viewer to perform a comparative reading rather than to receive a fixed thesis. The exhibition, in its totality, models a mode of museum experience in which the visitor is neither spectator nor consumer but a collaborator.
This is, finally, the proposition that Abramović and Baitel have placed before the field. The Renaissance painting tradition that the Accademia conserves was, in its time, an instrument for the spiritual formation of viewers. Pietàs and altarpieces were not decorative; they were operative. They proposed transformations of attention, of grief, of devotion. To install Abramović’s work within that collection is to suggest that the operative function of art—art as an instrument of the formation of consciousness—has not been abandoned but has migrated, in part, from the painted surface to the durational encounter and the embodied exercise.
Transforming Energy is a substantial exhibition by virtually any measure. The curatorial ambition, the institutional novelty, the historical pairings, the technical infrastructure of the avatar program, and the depth of the retrospective component all reward serious engagement. For art collectors, it offers a clear demonstration of where Abramović’s practice now sits within the museum economy and where her digital experiments are pushing it. For researchers, it provides material—both scholarly and visual—for a generation of writing on the body, the archive, and the digital afterlife of performance. For readers of art magazines, it offers a rare instance of an exhibition that does justice to its own historical claim: the first living woman artist embedded across the Accademia’s permanent galleries, an artist whose eightieth birthday is being marked not with elegy but with new work, and a curatorial proposition that takes seriously the possibility that the museum can still change how we use our own bodies.
Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy is on view at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. through October 19, 2026, before traveling to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. The exhibition is curated by Shai Baitel and organized in collaboration. with the Marina Abramović Institute and the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, with the support of the Ministero della Cultura and its Dipartimento per la Valorizzazione Culturale. The TAEX digital The program comprises six avatar-driven moving image works developed in collaboration with the artist.
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