Marina Abramovic: Peeling potatoes at the Museum Folkwang

I am sitting at a large table in the Museum Folkwang peeling potatoes, together with Aleksandar Timotic, a 31-year-old opera singer from Serbia. He was selected to take part in the interdisciplinary performance course with  Marina Abramovic for a year. The world-famous artist joined the Folkwang University of the Arts in 2022 as Pina Bausch's first guest professor. A mountain of potatoes is piled up in front of us.

Timotic has time, as well as a potato peeler. He will sit at this table for six hours a day until July 9, peeling potatoes and singing opera arias (a self-contained piece for solo voice, usually accompanied by orchestra). He invites the audience at the Museum Folkwang to sit with him, listen and take up the potato peeler themselves.

"Are you hungry?" is the name of the performance, which Timotic also describes as a gift of love to the audience.

He doesn't know yet whether he will last the six hours, he says. But Marina Abramovic has taught him to believe in himself. For a year, the globally renowned, New York-based artist taught the students via numerous Zoom conferences, but also during personal meetings to prepare the performances.

Discipline and willpower required

Abramovic put her students through a tough schooling, including a one-week "Cleaning the House" workshop in Greece.

"Cleaning the house" is to endure physical privations as a means get to know oneself better. This training camp lasted seven days.

"Five days of it, there is no eating, talking is forbidden. Instead we do physical exercises to understand what time is, what presence means, and afterwards we worked on what can now be seen here as a result," explained Abramovic.

The six hours that her students now perform every day at the Museum Folkwang in Essen is not comparable to her own dedication, however.

Abramovic became famous for sitting on a chair for 600 hours for her retrospective "The Artist is Present," at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2010. For over three months, she invited people to take turns sitting opposite her while staring into her eyes without speaking or making physical contact.

Abramovic not present in Essen

The 76-year-old Abramovic herself can only watch the performances live on screen. For health reasons, she is currently unable to travel. Full of pride, she told how she tried to convey the expansion of the concept of art, the involvement of the audience, discipline and self-conquest to the students of the Folkwang University of the Arts.

The results will be presented to the public for the first time at the Museum Folkwang at the end of the fourth and final phase of work, from June 30 to July 9.

"In such long-term performances you can't pretend, you become vulnerable," she said. "This creates a very emotional dialogue with the audience, which is something unique. And that's what the art students are showing now."

Translating experiences into art

A short time later, I am sitting on a chair again staring at a green wall. Behind me, Marija Radovanovic, dressed in a solemn green satin dress, is playing her violin.

"I wanted to create an opportunity for people to just sit there, without a mobile phone, just looking at a wall, resting their eyes," the performer explains.

She learned of art and sitting and contemplating at the "Cleaning the House" workshop. "I would like people to sit in the chair longer here too and just listen, look and think," she says.

A classically trained violinist, Radavanovic was born in Belgrade in 2001. In her performance, she also reflects on the pressure of being a musician.

"Especially string players, when they don't do something well they always want to punish themselves, because perfectionism is so strong in this profession, including me," she says.

Like Radovanovic, most of the other performers do not come from the visual arts, but are singer, directors, dancers or photographers. Abramovic has taught them each a universal principle, which is to always test one's limits.

Performances under live conditions

The fruit of the students' so-called Long Durational Performances is "54 Hours," a show wherein 24 very different performances happen in parallel in their own small booths. 

With his performance "Tabula Rasa," Italian Francesco Marzano reads aloud from his diaries, then tears out the pages one by one and destroys them.

Camillo Guthmann injures himself while tap dancing on mirror shards. Klara Günther poses on a pedestal, smearing herself with turnip greens, rolling in feathers and transforming herself into a strange bird creature.

Abramovic is thrilled that the students ventured so far with their practice.

"I asked her [Günther]: 'What are you afraid of?'," said Abramovic. "She replied: 'Being naked and a chicken.' I replied, 'Let's do it. Now she is naked and a chicken. I wanted to encourage her to tell her own story, her own drama."

This article was originally written in German.