OXFORD.- “The Pitt Rivers Museum is filled with tens of thousands of treasures reflecting the diversity and richness of cultures from all over the world. My research there could be never-ending.” - Marina Abramović

In August 2021, the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović undertook a research residency at the Pitt Rivers Museum in preparation for an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. That residency has now led to her Gates and Portals exhibition at Modern Art Oxford and an installation featuring new work by the artist at the Pitt Rivers Museum, both opening in Oxford in September 2022.

For Abramović, the residency was a kind of home coming, as she had previously developed an exhibition for Modern Art Oxford in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1995. Her now famous video work, Cleaning the Mirror was devised and exhibited at the Pitt Rivers at that time.

On her return to Oxford in 2021, Marina Abramović spent a month conducting research in the global collections of the Pitt Rivers, making drawings and filming her encounters with objects. She focused in particular on artefacts associated with rites of passage, magic and transformative states of consciousness from various communities around the world. When making her selection from the thousands of items on display in the museum, Abramović was drawn to certain things by the powerful energies they emit, saying: “I did not choose the objects. They chose me”.

The results of the artist’s interactions with those items will be revealed in a site-specific intervention in the galleries of the Pitt Rivers Museum, featuring a video work entitled Presence and Absence and new drawings made during her residency. Inserted in the heart of this world-leading museum of anthropology and archaeology, Abramović’s work sets up a dialogue with its historic displays and highlights the creativity and cultural diversity that the museum’s collections represent. In exhibiting the work of a major figure from the contemporary art world, the installation offers an exciting opportunity to see the Pitt Rivers in a new way and through the eyes of Marina Abramović.