The “Spirit House” Installation
Marina Abramovic designed the “Spirit House” installation in 1997 for an old municipal slaughterhouse in Caldas da Rainha. Now, 22 years later, the installation is being presented in Lisbon. “Spirit House” is made up of five videos that dialogue with each other, in which we see Marina Abramovic in different performances created for the camera: ‘Dissolution’, ‘Insomnia’, ‘Luminosity’, ‘Dozing Consciousness’ and ‘Lost Souls’.

In “Spirit House” we find reminiscences of the artist’s previous work - we see her performing various actions, such as whipping her back until it turns red or covering her face in extreme slow motion, in an allusion to recurring themes in her work, such as trauma, cultural memory or the concept of testing the body’s resistance to reach a higher state of consciousness - but also more surprising and unusual experiences in the author’s lexicon - for example, dancing an Arabic tango alone, in one of the rare works in which sound is present. There are hints of embryonic gestures here, as in “Luminosity”, where we see the performance that the artist originally conceived for video and which she would later perform live in museums. Revisiting the work reveals the relevance of modernity in Abramovic’s aesthetic program, in an overwhelming and disconcerting testimony to the visionary dimension of her work, which for decades has been questioning themes and issues that are once again on the agenda today, such as loneliness, pain, spiritual determination, the intensification of presence, the transcendence of the body, sacrifice, the feminine…

“Spirit House” refers to the inextricable unity of body and mind, in a constant challenge that has marked the artistic career of one of the most celebrated, striking and controversial figures on the contemporary art scene, the protagonist of the revolution in the concept of performance art.