Annalisa Burello – Art as Spirituality: The Paradigmatic Case of Marina Abramović
Can art be a shamanic tool?
Please note: the date for this event has changed. It was previously advertised for 26th August but has now been changed to 23rd September due unforeseen circumstances. All other details remain the same and existing Season Ticket holders will be sent the link on the day as usual.
In view of the upcoming Marina Abramović retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art (London), running from September 23rd to January 1st 2024, Annalisa Burello presents a reading of the artist’s career and personal life through a psychological and anthropological lens. In this artist’s ethnological study, Marina is the first-person informer through her autobiography, Walk Through Walls (2016), and several recorded interviews and talks that she has released over the years.
By analysing the artist’s description of anomalous experiences in early childhood, a blood disorder, a difficult and life-threatening birth, and several other physical ‘signs’ pointing to shamanic constitution, Burello conjectures that the artist would have been designated a shamanka, a female shaman, if she had been born in a shamanic culture. However, Marina was born in 1946 in communist Yugoslavia during Tito’s dictatorship, from war hero parents. Hence her more mystical and spiritual abilities could not find full expression until much later in life. Performance art became her ritualistic shamanic practice.
Contemporary performance artist Marina Abramović is an example of a post-modern, spiritual figure rooted in the artworld. Her relevance for a secular age is that of a contemporary artist who has developed her own brand of art-based spirituality. Although nonreligious, she does not conform to a materialistic worldview. She holds many so-called ‘New Age’ beliefs which place her among the growing SBNR demographic. She has developed her own ‘spiritual’ method to teach people beyond the elitist artworld, and has created the immaterial Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) to carry on her legacy.
Arguably, therefore, she has effectively transformed herself into a ‘spiritual’ teacher. Drawing on Denita Benyshek’s construct of artist-shaman, scientific explanations about the relieving of pain, and Victor Turner’s concept of spontaneous communitas, I conclude that Abramović is a spiritual charismatic figure who is generating countercultural communitas through her performances, her institute and her teachings, providing an empirical case that art can indeed function as a spiritual but not religious context. Sadly, like many powerful spiritual women burnt at the stake before her, she has been accused of Satanism by fundamentalist Christians and the American alt-right. Misogyny still looms large in the spiritual realm.
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About the speaker:
Annalisa Burello completed a Master’s Degree in Financial and Monetary Economics at Bocconi University in 1993 which led to a fifteen years career in finance and banking. After leaving banking in 2008, she retrained as a visual artist, attaining a BA (Hon) Photography at the University of Westminster in 2019. Her photography degree project was accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2022.
In 2022, she completed a Master’s degree in Anthropology – Religion in the Contemporary World – at the London School of Economics. Currently she is training to become a Holistic Integrated Creative Arts Therapy practitioner. Her interest in the connection between art and spirituality was ignited in 2017 by Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Since then, she has published two articles about art as spirituality and, from 2022, she has co-chaired the Spirituality and the Arts Special Interest Group (SASIG) under the International Network for the Studies of Spirituality (INSS).
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Speaker
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Annalisa BurelloArtist
Annalisa Burello completed a Master’s Degree in Financial and Monetary Economics at Bocconi University in 1993 which led to a fifteen years career in finance and banking. After leaving banking in 2008, she retrained as a visual artist, attaining a BA (Hon) Photography at the University of Westminster in 2019. Her photography degree project was accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2022.
In 2022, she completed a Master’s degree in Anthropology – Religion in the Contemporary World – at the London School of Economics. Currently she is training to become a Holistic Integrated Creative Arts Therapy practitioner. Her interest in the connection between art and spirituality was ignited in 2017 by Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Since then, she has published two articles about art as spirituality and, from 2022, she has co-chaired the Spirituality and the Arts Special Interest Group (SASIG) under the International Network for the Studies of Spirituality (INSS).
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