In Marina Abramović’s art, time is not a measure but a space for experimentation. A pioneer of performance and the exploration of physical and mental limits, her work has challenged the concepts of endurance, presence, and repetition. Now, with Igor Levit x Marina Abramović: Vexations (Southbank Centre, London, April 23–25, 2025), the artist once again places duration at the center of her practice, collaborating with pianist Igor Levit in an extreme interpretation of Erik Satie’s Vexations, a piece that pushes both music and the body to the edge of possibility.
Inspired by the ancestral practices of Australian Aboriginals, shamans, and Tibetan monks, Abramović has made ritual and repetition a path to expanded consciousness. “If you truly live in the present, time does not exist,” she states. In this new collaboration, the audience will witness an unprecedented feat: the complete performance of Vexations in a single session, with Levit immersed in an environment designed under the Abramović Method, where the act of playing merges with physical endurance and sensory immersion.
Since their first collaboration on Goldberg Variations (Armory, 2013), Abramović and Levit have shared an artistic pursuit based on experimentation and the absence of fear of failure. For Abramović, transformation occurs in difficulty, in that moment when the mind and body are pushed to their limits. “It’s a risk, but that’s what drives us,” she says. In a world oversaturated with stimuli and noise, her work insists on the power of silence, repetition, and absolute presence as the true radical acts of contemporary art.
A Conversation with Marina Abramović
By Carol Real
Carol Real:
In a couple of weeks, you will be presenting Igor Levit x Marina Abramović: Vexations (Southbank Centre, London, April 23–25, 2025).
Vexations is a piece that challenges endurance through repetition. How do you interpret the intersection between Erik Satie’s composition and your philosophy of performance?
Marina Abramović:
My entire learning about long duration, especially performance, is based on repetition because I’ve been so much inspired by ancient cultures. I lived with Aborigines for one year in the central desert, talked to shamans, and spent 25 years working with Tibetan monks in many different ways.
So all of these traditions are based on repetition because repetition has something to do with stabilizing consciousness in the mind.
The regular breathing and the regular intake of oxygen in your lungs make everything become so calm. Honestly, my understanding of time is that we have a feeling of time if we think about the past and the future, but if you really live in the present, time doesn’t exist. So to get to the point where time does not exist, it’s based on repetition.
To me, one of the exercises of Vexations by Satie is ideal as a subject to work on with Igor because it’s 840 times—whatever—the repetition of the same notes with small variations. Until now, no one has ever played this live in front of the public in one sitting. It was done, I think, in the sixties with John Cage, but with a big group of musicians, and everybody played just a small portion. But this is the first time that everything is played by one person. So it’s fantastic. And we don’t know if it’s going to be 12 hours, 14, or 16.
So the entire idea for me, in working with Igor, is that he will never leave the piano, and I have to accommodate that by creating this Abramović method—how this can be done. So basically, we created a structure where he can sleep, he can pee, he can rest, and the public is with him all the time. So he never actually leaves. There are two parts of the public—one in the audience and one on the stage. We kind of deconstruct the stage so that it actually becomes part of the seating for the audience. It’s pretty incredible. I mean, the whole concept—I’m so happy.
This is our second collaboration after Goldberg Variations, which we did at the Park Avenue Armory in 2013. That was a very different concept. One important thing about Igor—there are no people at that level of status and fame as a classical pianist who actually take risks with an artist like me because it is a risk. And he wants to go into things that are new for him and me too. So this is a combination made in heaven, basically.
Carol Real:
What drew you to Igor Levit’s artistic vision, making him the right collaborator for this project?
Marina Abramović:
I met him through Global Variation in 2013.
He was young and at the beginning of his career. Now he’s really at the top of his career. But when I met him, first of all, we have the same background—Slavic—and the same sense of humor about life. We became real friends. And even with a huge age difference—I’m 78, God,
I’m actually 79 this year and 80 next year. So life goes. But between us, I don’t feel that age difference. We are just like two kids, curious to experiment. One thing—both of us are not afraid of failure. If we fail, we fail, and then we stand up and do something else. But if you don’t fail, you can never actually change. If you don’t change, you’re always repeating yourself. And we’re not interested in repetition—not in my work, not in his work. If you put me in a box, I will always jump out of the box and do something different. He has the same kind of spirit. That’s really the relationship we have. Very strong.
Carol Real:
It’s great when you have this kind of understanding—to look at each other and know exactly what the other is thinking.
Marina Abramović:
Really, deep understanding. It’s not easy. Slavic people have a suffering soul. We are always suffering for something. The universe loves whatever is lost. And that feeling of suffering is so present in music, and books. I mean, if Dostoevsky didn’t suffer, he would never have written the books he did. It’s always about that.
Carol Real:
Your conversation with Pico Iyer will likely explore profound themes such as travel, solitude, and artistic identity. How do you see your work in relation to the idea of “inner journeys” versus physical ones?
Marina Abramović:
I think that I am a good representation of the modern moment because I don’t really have a home. I have a physical home here and there, but I’m always on the road, and my home is my body. So wherever I am, I’m home. Basically, every hotel room is another home, and I don’t have this feeling of being rooted somewhere. Even though I come from Yugoslavia and have a Slavic background, I am not a typical Slavic artist. I lived in Holland, I have a Dutch passport, and I am a Dutch artist. I live here. I don’t have an American passport, just a green card. But I don’t feel American either. I see the planet as my studio. I’ve gone around the globe so many times that I actually think the planet is not so big—it’s becoming claustrophobic. I’m looking at how they can make space out of this planet, space.
If I had the chance to take the journey and go into another galaxy as my last journey, I would do it because I want to know the main thing, the main question: where we come from, what is behind the cosmos, where life comes from. I mean, we don’t know anything. We are literally human beings who are born to die without ever asking ourselves these main questions. And I’m so curious. All my life, I’ve been curious. So the journey—my life—is a huge journey. My work comes from that journey.
I hate the studio. I never want to work in a studio because, to me, it’s a trap. If people wake up every morning and go to the studio, they rationally try to make the work. My work comes from life—I do the life. And when I have an idea, then I go to the studio to realize it, and then I leave the studio again.
Carol Real:
Very interesting because Igor talks about stillness, right? Pico Iyer often speaks about stillness within chaos. Given that your work frequently explores extremes, do you consider stillness an essential part of your practice?
Marina Abramović:
I make the work with your stillness. When I finish, when I say, “Okay,” and now the work comes—I mean, The Artist Is Present—a three-month absolute stillness. Then I stand up from the chair, and I make a journey again.
It’s a mix, but basically, it’s a journey, looking for the kind of situation where I’m always in the present. Whatever I do, I try to be in the present. Right now, I’m talking to you; I’m nowhere else. I’m with you, talking to you. Then we finish the conversation, and then it’s something else. But that kind of being here—because it’s very easy to talk to people while, in your mind, you’re in Honolulu or who knows where—but to be present, that’s difficult to achieve.
Carol Real:
Your work has engaged with movement—walking, endurance, and traveling to remote places in spiritual quests. How do you reconcile this with stillness as a deep artistic and existential act?
Marina Abramović:
Physically, I’m going to remote places. It’s very difficult. I’m always looking for places that don’t have Coca-Cola or electricity. There are not too many. You go to the end of the world, and you find this fucking Coca-Cola.
I don’t know. It’s natural to me. I don’t even question it. I have the work and the work. First of all, I don’t like the work. If I have an idea that I like, I’m not interested because it’s too easy. I am interested in things that I’m afraid of and that I don’t like, and then I confront them, and then I do them, and then I go to the next. This idea has to come like a surprise, has to come out of life—not from the studio, from life.
Carol Real:
Are stillness and movement two sides of the same coin?
Marina Abramović:
Of course. Like light and dark, and young and old. It is always the same. Light can’t exist without darkness. Darkness can exist without light. When you really understand this main principle, then life has a lot of meaning. You have to kind of ask yourself deep questions always.
Igor also has this deep curiosity in the search. We trust each other—that I will do my best, he will do his best, and the work will emerge. What I’m trying to do is prepare the public so that he can perform under the best possible conditions to truly understand the work. In the Goldberg Variations, I didn’t even know about this piece at first, but every night, when the audience arrives—exactly 650 people—we have 650 lockers. They must put away their phones, computers, and watches.
Technology is removed. They put on headphones to block out sound.
They enter this huge circle of deck chairs in the Armory and sit there in complete silence for 30 minutes. Everyone told me, “You’re crazy. No American is going to sit in silence for 30 minutes.” But they did—because people are tired; they are always running from one place to another. They can’t just rush into the music; they need space to adjust. Then you see Igor coming from far, far away, moving in total stillness toward the piano, without playing. It takes him 30 minutes to reach the center. When he arrives, you hear the gong. You feel the force. The headphones completely block out everything, and then he starts playing. He plays for exactly 86 minutes—the longest Goldberg Variations performance ever.
As he plays, the piano slowly moves in a circle, becoming darker and darker. In the end, the only thing you see are his hands, illuminated by a special light. It was magic. An incredible experience for the audience. People still talk about it because it truly prepared them to listen to that kind of music.
Here, we have a very similar situation, but different—more architectural and more complex. This time, we have people sitting on the stage and the audience in the public space. It’s a different concept, but we will see what happens.
Carol Real:
In an era of constant noise, has silence become a radical act? How does it shape your creative process?
Marina Abramović:
I think that we need more and more silence than ever before. That’s what really happened. When I introduced silence in a separate gallery, people got headphones to go inside. There was a little kid, 12 years old, who put on the headphones and said to me, “I don’t hear anything.” I said, “Yes, this is silence.” He had never in his life heard silence because every time he put on headphones, he listened to music.
He was so incredibly enthusiastic. The next day, he brought his entire class to listen to silence. Kids are so incredibly fucked up with the overuse of technology and video game systems. When you introduce them to something radically different, it’s like opening new horizons for them. So people need to understand silence more.
Carol Real:
You have spent long periods in isolation and silence. Is endurance a form of meditation for you, or does it bring you closer to something more existential—perhaps loneliness or emptiness?
Marina Abramović:
First of all, my work is about stillness a lot and about long duration. I talk long duration—not five hours, 10 hours, but one month, two months, three months. That’s a very long period, and it becomes exposed to the public. So, the performance becomes life itself.
You’re isolated, but at the same time, you’re sharing this isolation with the audience, and the audience can understand that kind of energy. Meditation is only one of the techniques, but nothing else. And for me, it’s about, again, this learning topic—to be present. Everything is about being present. So when you’re there, sitting with me, you are there with me, and you have to stop thinking. That’s the most difficult thing to do because we always think.
Right now, I’m talking to you, but you’re thinking about your next question, and I’m thinking about what your next question could be. So we have this curtain of thinking between us. But when we don’t think, when we don’t talk, and we just look at each other, then thinking slows down—slowly, slowly—and creates a space of emptiness. And when we enter that space of emptiness, we enter the present.
Carol Real:
In The Artist Is Present, time was stretched to its extreme. Do you believe time can be molded like clay, or does it ultimately shape us?
Marina Abramović:
First of all, there’s no time in the present. There’s nothing to shape. We don’t have a sense of time. If you’re sitting there and you’re thinking, How much time do I have? or What is the time?, you’ve completely lost it because your attention goes somewhere else. The whole idea of being in the presence is to understand that time is not there. And that’s a huge, huge kind of understanding. And you can only do it if you really experience it.
I can tell you about it, but it doesn’t mean anything to you because nobody changes by reading somebody else’s book or experiencing somebody else’s journey. Everybody changes by doing their own journey. So sit for three hours in silence and look at the wall. And then, all these questions you ask me—you answer them for yourself because you experience them yourself. That’s the thing.
It’s so difficult to tell something that you didn’t experience. The only change is that you read the book. The book is fantastic; it changes your life. But you’re still the same because you didn’t make the journey. The person in the book did the journey. So for me, the only way for people to change themselves, and even change the world, is to change themselves.
This is why, at the 2024 Glastonbury Festival, I proposed seven minutes of silence. I don’t know if you saw this documentary about the Glastonbury Festival—the rock and roll festival—where 275,000 people take mushrooms, drink, and take drugs. I asked, at a music festival, for something that seemed impossible. I really succeeded in having seven minutes—which is a long time for these kinds of people in these kinds of conditions—to be in total stillness. There was total stillness.
So that’s something I like to advertise and to bring into more stadiums of people. I mean, look at the student demonstrations in Belgrade. I don’t know if you know about that, but the student demonstrations are a long-duration performance of stillness and endurance. They started in November, and every single day, they stand in stillness on the street. Every single day since November. Last Sunday, there were 850,000 people—more than half a million.
Now they are being proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize because they are trying, with non-aggression, silence, and stillness, to change something. That’s the huge power of endurance and repetition. And right now, in Belgrade, if you look at The Guardian or magazines, it’s kind of incredible. I’ve been watching the livestream all the time to see what’s going on. You know, something that long—every single day. Every single day.
Here in America, so many things are happening in the streets, but the students are like catatonia. Nobody’s doing anything. Or maybe there’s a little demonstration. But this—this has been happening since November, December, January, February, and March. Now it’s March. They are still doing it every day, and they’re getting more and more people. Now, everybody is helping them. Last Sunday, it was 850,000 people—close to a million—on the street. Everything stopped. They stopped traffic; they stopped everything. They want the government to change, and they’re doing it through silent protest.
So repetition, silence, and presence—that’s a very big weapon if used wisely. I mean, Gandhi—Gandhi changed an entire country with revolution without spilling a single drop of blood. Just with that kind of method. That, to me, is important—to introduce silence, long duration, and repetition. This is what we are doing now with our tools. You see, relaxation.
Can you please look into the Belgrade students? Because it’s everywhere in the press. It’s kind of incredible to me. It’s one of the most inspiring movements. I just posted on the Internet, on social media, and I said, The students of Belgrade are the heroes of today. To me, they are. Now they’re being proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize. But already, one person in the government resigned, and another one went to prison. They are already achieving things, but they are striving for a complete change of government.
I don’t know how long it’s going to last. It’s going to be as long as it takes. But this has already been five months. That’s very long.
And these are young people.
Very young people. Now more and more are coming to Belgrade. They stopped the trains and buses because they didn’t want to allow them to come. So now, they are walking. They are all walking kilometers and kilometers—six days. Villages are helping them with accommodation, giving them food along the way to Belgrade.
So finally, this Sunday, 850,000 people arrived. More and more are coming because they don’t take buses, they don’t take planes, and they don’t take trains. They just walk. This is kind of a Slavic spirit. I like it very much.
They’re my kind of people.
Carol Real:
Do you think discomfort is a necessary gateway to transformation?
Marina Abramović:
Yeah, but it’s a very simple thing. Nobody makes any work from happiness.
This is a stage where you like to stay, and you don’t want to go anywhere. It’s not productive. People create, and people only really change through tragedy. If you have a terrible disease, an accident, or somebody in your family dies—something that pushes you to think about big, big, big questions—then you change.
So that’s something that really changes when you truly ask the big questions. This is why I don’t like to do things I don’t like—because there’s no change. But when you do things you’re afraid of, when you really confront something, then things change, and you can do something. And this is important.
Carol Real:
You have often described performance as a form of transformation. Do you see it as a way to transcend the self, or is it a deeper return to the self?
Marina Abramović:
Of course, it is a transformation. Every time you do such incredibly difficult work, you change—absolutely, transformation. So it’s definitely transformation. It’s not easy at all, and it’s so hard, so difficult, and takes every milligram of your energy self to do that. Yes.
This is what I think is also going to happen to Igor after he stands up from this piano after 16 or 14 hours of relaxation. This is what we are looking for.
All images courtesy of the artist, Marina Abramović Institute, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Editor: Kristen Evangelista