Marina Abramovic’s new project on show in Bergamo, Italy

With “Between Breath and Fire”, the Serbian artist makes her debut at the new cultural centre gres art 671 with the performance-work Seven Deaths, inspired by the opera singer Maria Callas.

Gres art 671, the new centre for contemporary art inaugurated last November in a former industrial plant in the outskirts of Bergamo, is ready to host Marina Abramović's exhibition Between Breath and Fire, curated by Karol Winiarczyk, from September 2024. Revolving around the film installation Seven Deaths dedicated to the opera singer Maria Callas, whose birth centenary falls this year, the exhibition presents a corpus of 30 works from the 1970s to the present, including the soundscape Tree first presented at the SKC Cultural Centre in Belgrade back in 1972. 

Seven Deaths, 2021 Pic from the film installation © Marina Abramović Courtesy of Marina Abramović Archives

Between Breath and Fire is structured around recurring key topics of Abramović's artistic practice- such as loneliness, human transience and profound connection between breath and fire – to highlight the artist's ability to trigger an emotional and spiritual transformation within the viewer through a cathartic and immersive experience. A goal, explains the president of gres art 671 Roberto Pesenti, that perfectly aligns with the mission of the cultural centre “born precisely with the ambition of involving visitors as much as possible, making them interact with the space and works” to become an active part of a collective path of reflection.

Opening image: photo Francesco Pierantoni from Flickr