Marina Abramović returns to London, and she does so from a territory she herself has built over decades: that of resistance, discomfort, and vulnerability as artistic material. In Saatchi Yates, the performance pioneer moves two of her best-known pieces—Blue Period and Red Period—from video to photographic stillness, displaying more than 1,200 individual images that, like remnants of an action, demand a different way of looking.
The operation is radical in its simplicity: slowing down the ephemeral. Where video flows and seduces with the continuity of movement, photography imposes a standstill and compels an active viewer, capable of holding their gaze in the face of the smallest gesture. Abramović thus dismantles the temporality of performance and turns it into an archive—but a living archive, pulsating in every frame.
In Red Period, the artist exposes herself in the foreground under a red monochrome bath. She smiles, provokes, points, and flirts with the viewer while her body oscillates between vitality and exhaustion. Pulling one’s hair, biting one’s finger, exhausting one’s smile: simple gestures that, repeated and broken down into frames, become a choreography of excess. Red here isn’t just color; it’s an ambivalent vibration: energy, desire, femininity, seduction, but also aggression and exhaustion.
In contrast, Blue Period introduces distance. The same frontal framing, the same exposed body, but now under a cold electric blue. The gesture changes: biting one’s nails, looking inward, sustaining a detachment that seems painful. The blue, accompanied by a trivial pop background, strips the scene of warmth and transforms it into vulnerability. Here, there is no seduction, but melancholy. There is no excess, but emotional exhaustion. What was erotic in red becomes fragility in blue.
Both works, originally part of Video Portrait Gallery (1975–2002), had already circulated in large institutions, but never in this way. The reinterpretation proposed by Saatchi Yates opens a new critical space: that of the still image as a condenser of intensity. By eliminating the linearity of video, Abramović destabilizes the viewer’s relationship with the work, forcing them to inhabit time differently, to lose themselves in the microscopic repetition of the gesture.
The exhibition is not only a tribute to his legacy, but also a statement on how the digital and the analog intersect in the present. What was once a video stream today becomes collectible material, a unique object. Each frame, when detached from the sequence, acquires an autonomous, almost relic-like value, which shifts the performance into the realm of the commodity image. A paradox that Abramović seems to embrace: the discomfort of seeing how the unrepeatable is transformed into a series.
Beyond the iconicity of his figure, the exhibition stands as an essay on color, the body, and the gaze. Red and blue as opposing energies in constant dialogue, the body as a space of resistance and vulnerability, and the gaze as a shared territory between artist and viewer.
The exhibition will be available at Saatchi Yates starting October 1st for one month only.
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