Sean Kelly Gallery

For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance. The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 –15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.

‘Freeing the Memory’ is the second of three significant performances enacted in 1976 in which Marina Abramović attempted to achieve a mental cleaning through the exhaustion of the three main faculties of expression, voice, language and body. In this piece, Abramović said every individual word she could recall until she could no longer continue without repetition. The mental strain of this act, which lasted ninety minutes, allowed the artist to exhaust her consciousness into a state of complete blankness.