Marina Abramovic hopes to premiere her video tribute to the opera singer Maria Callas, Seven Deaths, at the Royal Academy in London in 2020. The show has not been formally announced, but the Belgrade-born performance artist told The Art Newspaper it is her “dream” to unveil the long-awaited video installation at the institution.
Speaking at the launch last month of the As One performance art programme, co-organised by the Marina Abramovic Institute, at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the artist said Seven Deaths is “based on the idea that Maria Callas died of a broken heart”. In a series of seven ten-minute videos, Abramovic will perform the death scenes of seven tragic heroines embodied by the soprano, including Madame Butterfly, who stabbed herself, and Tosca, who jumped to her death from a parapet. “It’s a very private subject, a woman dying for love,” Abramovic said.
The process of making the work will be the subject of a documentary called Living Seven Deaths, Abramovic said. Filming is due to start this November after the publication of the artist’s 70th birthday memoir.
CORRECTION: This article was updated on 7 April to reflect that the directors Alejandro González Iñárritu and Roman Polanski are no longer working on the project as we previously reported.