Levitation of Saint Therese
Marina Abramović
Bernal Espacio Galería,
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- Title
- Levitation of Saint Therese
- Gallery
- Bernal Espacio Galería
- Year
- 2009
- Duration
- 11 min 21 s
The Kitchen is a set of videos and photos made in Spain, in the abandoned spaces of a kitchen (with an extraordinary architectural design, constructed during the Franco regime) in a convent of Carthusian nuns who fed more than 8000 orphans when the convent was active. Although the work is born as an homage to Saint Teresa of Avila—who in her writings tells of an experience of mystic levitation in the kitchen—it becomes above all an autobiographical work, considering that, as the artist herself states in the interview included in the catalogue: “In my childhood the kitchen of my grandmother was the center of my world: all the stories were told in the kitchen, all the advices regarding my life were given in the kitchen, all the future-telling through the cups of black coffee took place in the kitchen, so it was really the center of the world, and all my best memories come from there”.
Stills
Abramović was one of the first performance artists to become formally accepted by the institutional museum world with major solo shows taking place throughout Europe and the US over a period of more than 25 years.
Her first European retrospective ‘The Cleaner’ was presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 2017, followed by presentations at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, Henie Onstad, Sanvika, Norway (2017), among others. The artist’s opera ‘7 Deaths of Maria Callas’ was debuted at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, Germany in 2020, with further performances scheduled at Palais Garnier, Paris, France and the Greek National Opera, Athens, Greece in 2021.
Abramović has participated in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976, 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992). She has also established the MAI (Marina Abramović Institute) to support the future exploration and promotion of performance art.
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Bernal Espacio Galería
Ever since 2013, Bernal Espacio Galería has instilled unique aspects of contemporary creation into each of its projects. Its exhibitions, which are akin to cabinet and which feature relevant contemporary artists, are an invitation to introspection both with regards to the works and the artists, as well as the exaltation they give rise to among the audience.
Moreover, ever since its beginnings as an itinerant art gallery, Bernal Espacio Galería has sought a number of spaces ideally suited to each exhibition for its uninterrupted exhibition activity.
Ever since we began our exhibition activity, we have pooled our sensitivity and aesthetic skills to create ambiguous individual and collective exhibitions focused on photography, video, and drawing.
In short, Bernal Espacio is the result of a collective work with our permanent external collaborators, who contribute their aesthetic sensitivity to translate the strength and subtleness of the works into entirely unique exhibitions.