Marina Abramović in Venice: Between Presence and Belief, Where Does Transformation Truly Occur?
At the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Marina Abramović’s exhibition Transforming Energy turns presence, attention, and belief into the real field of the work.
Presented in the context of Biennale Arte 2026, the exhibition does not simply ask to be seen. It asks to be entered, endured, and questioned.
A performative exhibition built on presence
At the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Marina Abramović’s new exhibition Transforming Energy unfolds less as a show and more as a calibrated perceptual device. Presented in the orbit of the Biennale Arte 2026, it resists the conventional grammar of display and instead constructs a field of attention, where the viewer is not a spectator but a variable.
There are experiences that begin before they are understood. They do not offer themselves to interpretation but require a suspension of it. Abramović has long worked within this threshold, and here she radicalizes it. One does not “see” the exhibition so much as traverse it, moving through environments structured by an exacting relationship between body, material, and duration.
Crystals are positioned not as objects but as vectors. Locks of hair introduce an intimate, almost unsettling proximity to the organic. These are not symbolic gestures. They operate as presences, insisting on a form of inhabitation rather than observation. The viewer is not asked to decode, but to remain.
In this stillness, something shifts. Gesture recedes. Time dilates. The body, stripped of distraction, becomes a site of potential. Not action, but attention. Not participation, but exposure.
Is intensity already transformation?
The intensity is undeniable. It accumulates slowly, without spectacle, until it becomes palpable. Yet within this accumulation, a question persists: is intensity already transformation, or merely its condition of possibility?
That question does not dissolve once the experience ends. It migrates into language.
During the press conference, Abramović’s vocabulary remains consistent with her decades-long practice: energy, presence, passage, the movement from the physical toward the metaphysical. Transformation is not suggested, but asserted. It is here that the work opens a critical fissure.
The question that opened a fracture
A question interrupts the coherence of the discourse:
“When you speak of energy transformation, how do you prevent it from becoming something the audience consumes as intensity, rather than something that truly transforms them?”
Abramović’s response is immediate and unequivocal. The materials, particularly the crystals, are said to possess a “real energy,” capable of acting directly on the viewer’s body and perception. This is not metaphor, she insists, but condition.
Curator Shai Baitel reinforces this position. The experience, he suggests, is not merely perceptual or interpretive. It is grounded in an actual energetic dimension, one that produces tangible effects.
Between artwork and belief
It is precisely in this alignment that a subtle but decisive shift occurs.
If energy is posited as real, and if transformation depends upon it, then the artwork no longer functions as an open field of relations. It begins to operate as a system with a premise. The viewer is no longer only engaged in constructing meaning, but is also asked, implicitly, to accept a condition as given.
This alters the structure of the encounter.
The viewer moves from being an active agent within an indeterminate experience to becoming the point of verification for a claim. Transformation risks being pre-inscribed, rather than emergent. It becomes less something that happens, and more something that is expected to happen.
And yet, within the exhibition itself, something resists this closure.
In the silence of the rooms, in the tactile proximity to materials, in the elongated time of waiting, there is no imposition of meaning. The intensity remains unnamed. It does not demand belief. It asks only for presence.
The unresolved power of Abramović’s work
This is the paradox at the core of Abramović’s work today.
On one side, an experience that remains radically open, fragile, and contingent. On the other, a discourse that seeks to stabilize it, to affirm its transformative power as already real, already active.
Between these two poles, a tension emerges. Not a contradiction, but a productive instability.
Because perhaps transformation, if it occurs, does not reside in the energy of the materials, nor in the authority of the artist’s claim. Perhaps it resides in the gap between them. In the moment where the viewer neither fully believes nor fully resists. In the space where intensity has not yet been translated into certainty.
Between presence and belief, a threshold opens.
And it is precisely within this threshold, uncertain and unresolved, that Abramović’s work continues to generate its most vital friction.
