A man enters a hushed gallery, cradling a lifeless hare, its fur soft but cold. His face glistens with sticky honey and gold leaf, casting a faint, sweet scent into the still air. He leans close to the silent creature, his breath warm against its fur, and begins a strange, almost sacred act: whispering explanations of paintings meant for ears that cannot hear.
This haunting performance began as a groundbreaking work by German artist Joseph Beuys, a radical force redefining how we see, feel and experience art. His 1965 piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare continues to resonate, inspiring new generations of artists, including Marina Abramović, who re-performed it forty years later at the Guggenheim Museum as part of her “7 Easy Pieces” series.
At Museum Schloss Moyland in Germany, Beuys and Abramović meet in conversation in “Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys,” a landmark exhibition running through October 26, 2025. For the first time, Abramović and her institute (MAI) are engaging in an artistic discourse with Beuys’s visionary legacy. Central to the exhibition is the juxtaposition of their performances, inviting visitors to explore the evolving language of art as deeply personal, intuitive and often mystical.
Schloss Moyland as living stage
Schloss Moyland, with its neo-Gothic towers and surrounding parkland, houses one of the world’s largest Beuys collections. This exhibition transforms the archive into a living stage. Alongside documentation of Beuys’ and Abramović’s hare performances, the museum presents drawings, sculptures and archival materials, reactivated through the presence of live performers.
In March, thirteen international artists joined a residency led by the Marina Abramović Institute. Immersed in Beuys’s methods and Moyland’s archives, they developed new site-specific works that now unfold daily at the museum for up to ten hours. It is performance as lived endurance, reflecting Abramović’s belief that duration transforms life into art.
The resulting works carry distinct cultural and artistic inflections. Brazilian artist Rubiane Maia links Beuys’s ecological concerns to colonial legacies; Irish artist Sandra Johnston explores Beuys’s connections to Ireland; Italian-German Francesco Marzano turns breath into a collective instrument. The effect is less homage than dialogue, a multiperspectival exchange in which Beuys’ ideas are tested, reshaped and set in motion for a new generation.
Abramović’s golden hour
This ambitious project arrives at a golden hour for Abramović herself. In July 2025, the 78-year-old was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association—often called the Nobel Prize of the Arts. “They gave me the prize for sculpture,” Abramović tells Observer, “but my body is sculpture”—a reminder of how performance unsettles conventional classifications. “When you approach 80, receiving an award like this is both an honor and a reminder. It makes you think about the end of life before it actually arrives. But I’m not planning to die anytime soon. I’m still working like hell.”
Abramović began performing in the 1970s before small audiences that questioned whether her work was even art, and the recognition carries profound vindication. “It’s taken me 55 years to get here. It finally means my work is taken seriously. My voice can be heard, and I can promote immaterial art.”
From Rhythm 0 (1974), where the public could use objects on her body, to The Artist Is Present (2010), where thousands queued to sit silently with her, the Praemium Imperiale underscores what the Moyland exhibition makes clear: Abramović is both an individual artist and an architect of performance’s future.
MAI and the Abramović method
That future is embodied in the Marina Abramović Institute, founded in 2007 and now based in a converted hotel in Karyes, Greece. For Abramović, MAI is not a final artwork but a living legacy—a platform to sustain performance art across generations. “The Institute preserves performance art,” she explains, “and while my work keeps evolving, the Institute is my legacy.”
At Moyland, MAI’s ethos of long-duration art is palpable. Performers, trained in the Abramović Method, undertake demanding works designed to sharpen stamina and presence. The discipline, Abramović insists, grants dignity to performance: “When it’s something very long, the public feels it. Performance becomes life itself, and the audience becomes a supportive community.”
The exhibition is thus a test case for how archives can be made alive, how new performers can be nurtured and how immaterial art can claim equal footing with painting and sculpture.
Old art, new voices
Among the thirteen artists, the Irish Sandra Johnston works with durational performance and archival research to transform historical materials. At Moyland, she engaged with Beuys’s archive, inspired by the visionary works he transplanted to Ireland decades earlier. Using blackboards, newspapers and objects, she developed slow, somatic actions. “Seven days, seven-hour performances. It’s exhausting,” she says of the physical and mental challenges. Many gestures are minute—a stag’s tooth rotated between fingers, a mark traced on the floor, a slow bodily rotation—each movement tuned to the space, the materials and the audience. Confirming Abramović’s insight, Johnston emphasizes that sustained audience attention fuels the performance and reinforces the reciprocity at the heart of her practice.
Complementing Johnston’s somatic intimacy, Francesco Marzano approaches performance from a communal, auditory perspective. Building on his flautist training and studies with Abramović at the Folkwang University’s Pina Bausch Professorship, his Moyland work, Pneuma – Wärmezeitmaschine, transforms breathing into a collective sculpture. Ten microphones amplify performer and visitor breaths, layering rhythms from intimate whispers to full choruses. “Breathing is communication without words. It’s life, soul and connection,” he tells Observer.
He credits Abramović’s Cleaning the House workshop—five days of silence, fasting and endurance—as foundational: “It was life-changing. Without that training, doing seven- to eight-hour days would have been impossible. It taught me how to be present for so long, how to slow down time.”
Young audiences respond enthusiastically to both approaches. Children, school groups and social media visitors are drawn to the immersive, slow experiences Johnston and Marzano create, often returning to engage in shared attention and presence. Abramović frames this intergenerational exchange as reciprocal: “I give them old-school wisdom, but they give me freshness. My generation complains too much—I need fresh minds.”
Reanimating the Beuys archive
At Moyland, this dialogue between generations comes alive. The exhibition demonstrates how archives can be reanimated, how younger artists inherit and transform long-standing practices and how institutions can give immaterial art the same weight as painting or sculpture. For Beuys, art was a social sculpture, and every action was charged with creative potential. For Abramović, art is presence itself: the body as material, the audience as co-creator, time as canvas. At Moyland, these visions converge and evolve.
Abramović notes that performance resurfaces in moments of economic strain: “When the economy is going down, performance art comes up because it doesn’t cost much… It creates vitality that can never disappear.” In today’s age of distraction, that vitality feels essential, shaping the exhibition’s insistence on slowness, repetition and communal intensity.
While the echo of the past lingers, the hare of 1965 is long gone, its fur dust. Yet voices, bodies and breath now sustain the performance. What began as one man explaining pictures to a dead animal has become a collective act of attention—proof that in performance art, presence endures and remains the most radical act of all.
“Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys” is on view at Museum Schloss Moyland through October 26, 2025.
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Petra Loho
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