A person enters a hushed gallery, cradling a dull hare, its fur comfortable however chilly. His face glistens with sticky honey and gold leaf, casting a faint, candy scent into the nonetheless air. He leans near the silent creature, his breath heat towards its fur, and begins a wierd, virtually sacred act: whispering explanations of work meant for ears that can’t hear.
This haunting efficiency started as a groundbreaking work by German artist Joseph Beuys, a radical pressure redefining how we see, really feel and expertise artwork. His 1965 piece Learn how to Clarify Photos to a Lifeless Hare continues to resonate, inspiring new generations of artists, together with Marina Abramović, who re-performed it forty years later on the Guggenheim Museum as a part of her “7 Simple Items” sequence.
At Museum Schloss Moyland in Germany, Beuys and Abramović meet in dialog in “Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys,” a landmark exhibition operating via October 26, 2025. For the primary time, Abramović and her institute (MAI) are partaking in an inventive discourse with Beuys’s visionary legacy. Central to the exhibition is the juxtaposition of their performances, inviting guests to discover the evolving language of artwork as deeply private, intuitive and infrequently mystical.
Schloss Moyland as dwelling stage
Schloss Moyland, with its neo-Gothic towers and surrounding parkland, homes one of many world’s largest Beuys collections. This exhibition transforms the archive right into a dwelling stage. Alongside documentation of Beuys’ and Abramović’s hare performances, the museum presents drawings, sculptures and archival supplies, reactivated via the presence of reside performers.
In March, 13 worldwide artists joined a residency led by the Marina Abramović Institute. Immersed in Beuys’s strategies and Moyland’s archives, they developed new site-specific works that now unfold each day on the museum for as much as ten hours. It’s efficiency as lived endurance, reflecting Abramović’s perception that length transforms life into artwork.
The ensuing works carry distinct cultural and inventive inflections. Brazilian artist Rubiane Maia hyperlinks Beuys’s ecological issues to colonial legacies; Irish artist Sandra Johnston explores Beuys’s connections to Eire; Italian-German Francesco Marzano turns breath right into a collective instrument. The impact is much less homage than dialogue, a multiperspectival trade through which Beuys’ concepts are examined, reshaped and set in movement for a brand new era.
Abramović’s golden hour
This bold challenge arrives at a golden hour for Abramović herself. In July 2025, the 78-year-old was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture by the Japan Artwork Affiliation—usually known as the Nobel Prize of the Arts. “They gave me the prize for sculpture,” Abramović tells Observer, “however my physique is sculpture”—a reminder of how efficiency unsettles standard classifications. “While you method 80, receiving an award like that is each an honor and a reminder. It makes you concentrate on the top of life earlier than it really arrives. However I’m not planning to die anytime quickly. I’m nonetheless working like hell.”
Abramović started performing within the Nineteen Seventies earlier than small audiences that questioned whether or not her work was even artwork, and the popularity carries profound vindication. “It’s taken me 55 years to get right here. It lastly means my work is taken significantly. My voice may be heard, and I can promote immaterial artwork.”
From Rhythm 0 (1974), the place the general public may use objects on her physique, to The Artist Is Current (2010), the place 1000’s queued to take a seat silently along with her, the Praemium Imperiale underscores what the Moyland exhibition makes clear: Abramović is each a person artist and an architect of efficiency’s future.
MAI and the Abramović technique
That future is embodied within the Marina Abramović Institute, based in 2007 and now based mostly in a transformed resort in Karyes, Greece. For Abramović, MAI will not be a closing art work however a dwelling legacy—a platform to maintain efficiency artwork throughout generations. “The Institute preserves efficiency artwork,” she explains, “and whereas my work retains evolving, the Institute is my legacy.”
At Moyland, MAI’s ethos of long-duration artwork is palpable. Performers, educated within the Abramović Technique, undertake demanding works designed to sharpen stamina and presence. The self-discipline, Abramović insists, grants dignity to efficiency: “When it’s one thing very lengthy, the general public feels it. Efficiency turns into life itself, and the viewers turns into a supportive group.”
The exhibition is thus a check case for a way archives may be made alive, how new performers may be nurtured and the way immaterial artwork can declare equal footing with portray and sculpture.
Previous artwork, new voices
Among the many 13 artists, the Irish Sandra Johnston works with durational efficiency and archival analysis to remodel historic supplies. At Moyland, she engaged with Beuys’s archive, impressed by the visionary works he transplanted to Eire a long time earlier. Utilizing blackboards, newspapers and objects, she developed sluggish, somatic actions. “Seven days, seven-hour performances. It’s exhausting,” she says of the bodily and psychological challenges. Many gestures are minute—a stag’s tooth rotated between fingers, a mark traced on the ground, a sluggish bodily rotation—every motion tuned to the area, the supplies and the viewers. Confirming Abramović’s perception, Johnston emphasizes that sustained viewers consideration fuels the efficiency and reinforces the reciprocity on the coronary heart of her apply.
Complementing Johnston’s somatic intimacy, Francesco Marzano approaches efficiency from a communal, auditory perspective. Constructing on his flautist coaching and research with Abramović on the Folkwang College’s Pina Bausch Professorship, his Moyland work, Pneuma – Wärmezeitmaschine, transforms respiratory right into a collective sculpture. Ten microphones amplify performer and customer breaths, layering rhythms from intimate whispers to full choruses. “Respiratory is communication with out phrases. It’s life, soul and connection,” he tells Observer.
He credit Abramović’s Cleansing the Home workshop—5 days of silence, fasting and endurance—as foundational: “It was life-changing. With out that coaching, doing seven- to eight-hour days would have been unattainable. It taught me tips on how to be current for thus lengthy, tips on how to decelerate time.”
Younger audiences reply enthusiastically to each approaches. Kids, college teams and social media guests are drawn to the immersive, sluggish experiences Johnston and Marzano create, usually returning to have interaction in shared consideration and presence. Abramović frames this intergenerational trade as reciprocal: “I give them old-school knowledge, however they provide me freshness. My era complains an excessive amount of—I want recent minds.”
Reanimating the Beuys archive
At Moyland, this dialogue between generations comes alive. The exhibition demonstrates how archives may be reanimated, how youthful artists inherit and rework long-standing practices and the way establishments can provide immaterial artwork the identical weight as portray or sculpture. For Beuys, artwork was a social sculpture, and each motion was charged with inventive potential. For Abramović, artwork is presence itself: the physique as materials, the viewers as co-creator, time as canvas. At Moyland, these visions converge and evolve.
Abramović notes that efficiency resurfaces in moments of financial pressure: “When the economic system goes down, efficiency artwork comes up as a result of it doesn’t value a lot… It creates vitality that may by no means disappear.” In at the moment’s age of distraction, that vitality feels important, shaping the exhibition’s insistence on slowness, repetition and communal depth.
Whereas the echo of the previous lingers, the hare of 1965 is lengthy gone, its fur mud. But voices, our bodies and breath now maintain the efficiency. What started as one man explaining footage to a useless animal has grow to be a collective act of consideration—proof that in efficiency artwork, presence endures and stays probably the most radical act of all.
“Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys” is on view at Museum Schloss Moyland via October 26, 2025.
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