by Martina Esposito and Rebecca Grossi
“Let’s talk about Marina.” With these words, curator Shai Baitel began his interview with Inside Art, confirming that Marina Abramović will be coming to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome with a new exhibition. Following her presentation at the Gallerie dell’Accademia during the Venice Biennale, the renowned Serbian artist will be one of the protagonists of the Roman autumn with Transforming Energy and Legacy Works, a major retrospective that will both expand upon the themes explored in Venice within the spaces of the GNAMC and examine the historical, artistic and intellectual legacy that Marina Abramović has left to the world.
The exhibition will once again be curated by Shai Baitel, as was the Venice show. The legacy segment will be curated by Andrea Tarsia. Baitel is the director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) in Shanghai and co-founder of Mana Contemporary, a multidisciplinary art centre in Jersey City through which he has developed collaborations with some of the most important figures in the art world, including Marina Abramović herself. During his conversation with Inside Art, Baitel discussed the upcoming exhibition at the GNAMC as well as his international curatorial experiences, from Riyadh to the MAM Shanghai.
Can you confirm that the GNAMC will host a major exhibition dedicated to Marina Abramović?
Yes, the Galleria Nazionale will host Marina Abramović’s exhibition Transforming Energy and Legacy Works, similar to the one we currently have in Venice, which opened during the Biennale at the beginning of May. It is a historic exhibition because it is the first time we have presented the Transitory Objects in a way that allows the public to actively participate. The work is, in fact, incomplete if the audience does not engage with the crystals.
What Marina and I have done with this exhibition is, in a sense, to suggest that we are curating energy. It represents a new idea of curatorship. The objects on display are three-dimensional, but their essential purpose is to host minerals and crystals. And the crystals are there because of their energy. Each stone contains unique qualities and properties, capable of generating different forms of energy, with which each visitor establishes a different relationship.
What we observe throughout this process is that every individual takes time, gives themselves space and, through their own sensitivity, rediscovers themselves, truly purifies their body and absorbs positive energy. They enter the exhibition in one state of mind and leave it in another.
Alongside Transforming Energy, the exhibition will also present Marina Abramović’s Legacy Works, namely her most historical pieces spanning the entire arc of her career. It is essentially a presentation of her artistic journey through the most significant works she has created. This section will introduce Transforming Energy and offer visitors a combined experience, allowing them to understand Marina Abramović’s history as a pioneer of performance art before arriving at her most recent research.
Is it difficult to bring together the different phases of the artist’s research within a single exhibition?
I don’t know if it is difficult. Marina is a very particular artist. She is truly unique, with a different approach: she is deeply spiritual and philosophical. She has a manifesto: she believes in the actions that people can undertake to make a difference in themselves, in the environment around them and in their relationships with others. Through the Marina Abramović Method, she offers tools that help us feel better: focusing, counting, reconnecting with nature.
A great deal of what Marina does is based on meditation. Many of her works share recurring principles. She has a truly authentic voice, profoundly her own, which cannot be found in any other artistic language. In this sense, she has created a new visual language through performance. This can be found throughout her entire production, both in her performances and in her objects.
Marina has created an extraordinary body of work. Perhaps the challenge lies in selecting the pieces that stand out the most, even though every part of her practice is important. From this perspective, I hope that what Andrea Tarsia and I have chosen for the public is genuinely representative of her research and can have a strong impact on visitors.
When will the exhibition open? In which spaces of the museum will it take place?
The exhibition will open to the public on 17 November and will remain open for five months. It will be held in the museum’s exhibition spaces that currently host the Fendi exhibition.
You first met Marina Abramović through Mana Contemporary. How did your relationship begin?
It is a beautiful story. The first time we contacted Marina was to invite her to visit the art centre. We wanted to work with her, but she never had time. Then, one day, she told me she could come on a Friday, but only for 30 minutes.
It was winter, extremely cold, and we knew it was going to snow. Marina arrived at the centre and, at that very moment, it started snowing. Soon the snowfall turned into a real snowstorm and nobody could leave. Those 30 minutes therefore became hours.
It was an extraordinary meeting because we had the opportunity to talk about so many things. She told us many jokes, we ate a hot soup together, and a truly special bond was created. It was the beginning of a friendship and a professional collaboration. That is how we met.
Since then, naturally, we have had many opportunities to exchange ideas. When I was appointed artistic director in China, Marina told me that it had always been her dream to create an exhibition in the country, because for three decades all her exhibitions there had been rejected or cancelled.
After she walked along the Great Wall of China, she had never presented another exhibition project in the country. I told her: “Let’s try.” That was when we conceived Transforming Energy, a project entirely focused on her work with minerals and on the Transitory Objects.
Speaking of China, you have been leading the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai since 2020. What approach did you bring to this context? You have curated exhibitions dedicated to Bob Dylan and Zaha Hadid. How were these exhibitions received by Chinese audiences?
When I was appointed, it was immediately clear to me that I had to bring something different. My approach to curatorship is unconventional. I do not like the white cube, nor the traditional retrospective understood as a path that imposes a specific order of interpretation. I prefer the audience to experience the artwork, while still recognising the important educational value of retrospectives.
For me, the starting point is not the artist or the artwork, but the audience. The question I always ask myself is: how will visitors react? What is the story I want to tell? Only afterwards do I look at the “ingredients”, as a chef would, and think about how to combine them in order to create an experience.
With Bob Dylan, for example, everything originated from an episode in his life: the train journey from Duluth to New York to meet Woody Guthrie and perform at Café Wha?. I imagined that journey becoming the very structure of the exhibition, allowing visitors to travel through the different stages of his career as if they were on the train with him. The exhibition debuted in Shanghai, then travelled to several Chinese museums, reached the MAXXI in Rome and was also presented in the United States, receiving great acclaim.
With Zaha Hadid, on the other hand, I felt a responsibility to create a comprehensive exhibition after her passing. She and I were friendly and, together with Patrick Schumacher, who now leads her studio, we developed a journey bringing together sketches, paintings, projects, realised buildings and design objects. In China, we also included all of her projects for the country and suspended them from the ceiling, giving visitors the sensation of walking among floating buildings, almost like clouds.
The same approach guided the exhibition dedicated to Kenny Scharf. I wanted to tell the story of one of the last great figures of the East Village, explaining his way of representing emotions and placing his work within the broader history of art. At the centre of the exhibition, we recreated a real Kenny Scharf Beach Club, inspired by Venice Beach, with pink sand, purple trees and a replica of the artist’s famous lifeguard tower.
Ultimately, my goal is always the same: to place the experience at the centre of the exhibition. The audience has changed. Smartphones have transformed the way we consume content and our attention span. Telling a story today is much more difficult than it was twenty years ago. Young people are curious, demanding and hungry for content. This is why we need to find ways to communicate art so that they can truly make it their own.
This is precisely why the Kenny Scharf exhibition was able to engage younger audiences, but also families and a very broad public.
Your career has been entirely international. In this sense, what was your experience with Mana Contemporary?
Mana Contemporary was a truly extraordinary experience. We joined the project between 2010 and 2011, when the owner purchased around 2.2 million square feet of warehouses on the outskirts of New York with the idea of transforming them into an art centre. It was an extremely ambitious plan: to create something the world had never seen before.
I immediately realised that the complex already housed dozens of private collections, thanks to its storage facilities, as well as several artists’ studios. What was missing were exhibition spaces, art services and all those elements capable of creating a genuine creative ecosystem.
The idea was to enhance what was already preserved within the centre, bringing collections into dialogue with new exhibition spaces and creating an increasingly large community of artists.
At the same time, the artist community continued to grow. At the beginning it was still in its early stages; today Mana hosts around 400 artists with permanent studios and is probably the largest artist community in the world. It also manages approximately 800 collections.
This gave us the opportunity to work with some of the most important collections in the United States and to create exhibitions directly from the works housed at the centre. We organised exhibitions dedicated to Andy Warhol’s original screen prints, Arnulf Rainer, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin and numerous projects focused on California artists, including Ed Ruscha and many other protagonists of the West Coast scene.
It was an extraordinary period because we were able to conceive exhibitions starting from what Mana had to offer: works from the collections preserved in the centre or pieces created directly by the artists who worked in their studios.
At the same time, we opened a theatre, hosted an orchestra, created a space dedicated to dance with Carol Armitage and developed numerous interdisciplinary activities. Mana became, and remains today, a multidisciplinary centre. Whenever I visit it, I feel an enormous sense of pride. Having been among the founders of such an ambitious project is something I am truly proud of.
Later, we opened a location in Chicago and another in Miami. In Miami, we chose to focus on street art, an area from which I learned a great deal and which deeply influenced my work in the following years.
You also worked on street art in Saudi Arabia.
The experience I gained through street art led me, in 2022, to be selected by the Saudi Ministry of Culture as the first artistic director of Riyadh’s first Street Art Biennale. It was a project I worked on for two years.
The event included 35 new murals, projections of works from around the world, large-scale site-specific installations and numerous activities hosted inside a former hospital made available by the Saudi government.
I wanted the location itself to become an integral part of the experience. For this reason, we reused the debris found throughout the site, transforming it into large installations. Among them was an enormous Arabian horse built entirely from rubble and illuminated from within, as well as a 25-metre-long snake, also made from recycled materials. The snake referred both to the symbol of medicine, in homage to the building’s former function, and to the idea of rebirth and transformation.
Among the invited artists were Refik Anadol, GucciGhost, Philip Colbert, Kenny Scharf and numerous street artists from the Arab world. With Anadol, we transformed the huge water tanks of the former hospital into immersive installations, recreating the illusion of water through digital projections.
The project was also connected to the Vision 2030 promoted by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. We created a skatepark conceived as an artwork, where murals were reflected onto the surface of the track during the skaters’ movements, and brought together breakers from Harlem with young Saudi dancers, creating an encounter between different cultures.
When the Minister of Culture entrusted me with the project, he told me he wanted to create a “Saudi Wynwood”. I replied: “We will create something even better.” The goal was not to replicate a Western model, but to build a bridge between the visual culture of the Middle East and that of the West.
Arab street art, in fact, has a different history from Western street art: it developed mainly through calligraphy, while in the West it often emerged as a language of protest and the appropriation of public space. Bringing these two traditions into dialogue was one of the most stimulating aspects of the project.
Despite taking place during Covid, the event welcomed around 170,000 visitors, confirming the strong interest in a project capable of combining art, music, immersive installations and intercultural dialogue.
This year you are part of the jury of the Talent Prize, the visual arts competition for young artists promoted by Inside Art.
Joining the Talent Prize jury is a very stimulating experience because what I constantly search for are new languages. At a time in history when it seems that everything has already been done, I always ask myself whether it is still possible to surprise.
When I enter an artist’s studio, I often say: “Show me a new colour. Show me a new shape.” It is obviously a provocation, because creating something completely new is extremely difficult. Yet, every once in a while, one encounters artists who not only propose an original language, but also introduce a different way of thinking.
As a curator, I am interested in understanding what I can offer the public that is genuinely new.
This is the same approach I am applying to the Keith Haring exhibition I am currently working on. I want to move away from the most conventional interpretations and instead focus on the theme of patterns. In Haring’s works, the Radiant Baby and his other figures are almost always surrounded by repeated signs and recurring patterns. I find this aspect fascinating because repetition makes the image immediately recognisable, allowing it to enter the viewer’s mind and become part of the visual experience.
And this is exactly what I look for as a member of the Talent Prize jury as well: identifying something that perhaps has not yet been explored.
I believe museums today need more young people. If we look at museum institutions, we often find directors who are seventy or eighty years old and struggle to make room for new generations, while the audience has completely changed.
In my team, almost everyone is in their twenties. I need young people who can help me maintain a direct connection with new audiences. Even when we work with iconic artists such as Basquiat, Warhol or Haring, we have to present them through a contemporary perspective. We need to communicate their work in a way that today’s audiences can understand and truly absorb.
If a visitor enters my museum and leaves without having learned anything, then I have failed. I consider myself first and foremost an educator, but I also need to be intelligent in the way I “package” this experience.
Ultimately, this is my mission.
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