Marina Abramović ‘between breath and fire’

The spaces of Gres Art 671 – the art and culture centre founded in bergamo by Italmobiliare Group with Fondazione Pesenti, opened in the year of bergamo-brescia Italian capital of culture and for which the lighting design was curated by Viabizzuno – from 14 september 2024 to 16 february 2025 hosted one of the most significant exhibitions on the Italian and international cultural scene: ‘Marina Abramović. Between breath and fire’ curated by karol winiarczyk.

In a path that investigated the artist’s key themes – breath, body, relationship with the other and death – between performance, sensorial experience and materic research, thirty recent and iconic works narrated the greatness, loneliness, myth and transience of the human being from the perspective of one of the most influential artists of our time.

At the centre of this multifaceted project there was the film-installation ‘seven deaths’, which Marina Abramović dedicates to maria callas: a series of parallels and cross-references between the lives of the two artists culminates in the opera-film that evokes seven tragic and premature deaths of heroines played by the soprano.

The exhibition also involved for the first time the garden of gres art 671 with the soundscape ‘tree’, in which the diffusion among the trees of a birdsong blurred the boundaries between natural and artificial, reality and fiction, mortality and transcendence.

In this exhibition tracing the entire artistic career of Marina Abramović, light played a fundamental role not only in understanding the works, but above all in creating an immersive atmosphere aimed at establishing a contact with the observer.

In the large exhibition space of gres art 671 Viabizzuno ariacablata system has been installed, which with its 500 metres of A1, A10 and A11 tracks can provide great lighting flexibility: the n55 spotlights, thanks to their ease of installation and positioning, provide accent lighting for each artwork, leaving the rest of the space in suggestive semi-darkness.

The linear light, switched on only when needed, gives aesthetic uniformity to the exhibition layout.

trentotto sagomatore, the Viabizzuno optic designed for artworks on display, was used for this exhibition. With a body of only 38 millimetres, this spotlight can frame objects and enhance their characteristics with maximum precision, uniformity and correct intensity, guaranteeing maximum light quality and a very low damage factor.

In an exhibition landscape in which light and shadow become a means of communication, the visitor abandons the role of a mere observer and – by activating all the senses – participates in the strong and contrasting emotions conveyed by Marina Abramović’s works.