Beyond The Gates: A Conversation

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form. She created some of the most important early works in this practice, including Rhythm 0 (1974), as well as Rhythm 5 (1974). These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. They pushed the boundaries of self-discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance.

In 2012, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a nonprofit foundation for performance art, that focuses on performance, long durational works, and the use of the Abramović Method. Abramović was one of the first performance artists to become formally accepted by the institutional museum world with major solo shows taking place throughout Europe and the US over a period of more than 25 years.

In 2024, Abramović opened her first solo exhibition in China, Transforming Energy, at the Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai. In 2023, Abramović was the first female artist to host a major solo exhibition in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her first European retrospective, The Cleaner, was presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 2017, followed by presentations at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Henie Onstad, Sanvika, Norway (2017), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2018), Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun (2019), and concluding at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbia (2019). In 2010, Abramović had her first major US retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

lgal Nassima is the lead developer for The Gates Augmented Reality Experience, powered by Bloomberg Connects, currently on view in Central Park. He is an artist and technologist exploring the convergence of code and human experience. Born in Istanbul, he is the founder of Superbright, an award-winning studio crafting immersive works that blur the line between the physical and the virtual—transforming AR, VR, and interactive technology into tools for storytelling, reflection, and play. His work is driven by a passion for making emerging technologies more accessible to creative communities.

In 2021, he co-founded Vortic XR, a platform that reimagines how art is experienced beyond the white cube, bringing museum-quality exhibitions from the world’s leading galleries into extended reality. As the head of engineering, he leads the team shaping the future of digital curation.

Igal’s projects have been exhibited globally at MoMA, Venice Architecture Biennale, Tribeca Festival, Sundance, and SXSW, where he won the first-ever Jury Selection for Future of Experiences. Alongside his practice, he is an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch ITP, where he teaches Social Virtual Reality, exploring the role of digital interactivity in contemporary culture.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is the artistic director of the Serpentine in London and senior advisor at LUMA Arles. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Most notable amongst these are the “Do It” series (1993 –), Take Me (I’m Yours) in London (1995), Paris (2015) New York (2016), and Milan (2017); and the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice (2014). Obrist has also co-curated the “Cities on The Move” series (1996–2000), Laboratorium (1999); the operatic group exhibition Il Tempo del Postino in Manchester (2007) and Basel (2009), and The 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Rooms series (2011 – 15). Obrist’s recent exhibitions include Enzo Mari at Triennale Milano (2020) and WORLDBUILDING at Centre Pompidou Metz (2023) and Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf (2022). The Handwriting Project, which protests the disappearance of handwriting in the digital age, has been taking place on Instagram since 2013 (@hansulrichobrist).

In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize. Most recently he was honoured by the Appraisers Association of America with the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021), Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023), Remember to Dream (2023), and Une vie in Progress (2023).