Known for works that push both her body and her audience to extreme limits, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic is these days inviting people to decompress by taking a break from digital overload.
For a retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich art museum in Switzerland that traces her 55-year career, Abramovic created a new installation called Decompression Chamber.
Inside, the 78-year-old artist invites visitors to put away their mobile phones, watches and any other distracting items, don a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and sit back in a deckchair to relax, lose track of time and reconnect with their inner selves.
Abramovic said it is “my response to the overuse of technology”.
“This allows visitors to get in touch with the here and now and go into their own selves. It is an opportunity to detach from the external and reattach to the internal,” she said.
It is a riposte to a world in which the younger generation takes photographs with their phones in an exhibition before they have any experience of actually seeing the work and engaging with it on a deeper level, she said.