Marina Abramović collaborates with WeTransfer on her iconic performance work The Abramović Method

WeTransfer has unveiled a digital video series by the acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramović, devised from her credited work The Abramović Method – a performance piece developed over decades that invites the audience to involve themselves in exercises of breath, motion, stillness and concentration. A year-long collaboration with WeTransfer’s digital arts platform WePresent, the artist shares her knowledge and wisdom on performance art through a compilation of four exercises leveraged throughout the series, all of which are available worldwide to the platform’s community of 80 million people.

These exercises can be done easily and will benefit daily life, like water drinking, counting rice, walking in slow motion and mutual gazing – the latter involving two people making eye contact, which is an exercise that the artist has become widely known for. Each of which is devised from The Abramović Method, and now given a new digital life in form of an immersive online performance, conceived through a custom video player crafted by WeTransfer that incorporates interactive animation and audio.

“To be a performance artist, it’s a very difficult task,” says Abramović in the release. “You need lots of preparation in order to make long durational performance work. So I developed different exercises to help myself generate willpower and concentration, crossing physical and mental limits. Later on, I understood these exercises can serve not just me but any profession in the world and so I turned these into something I call The Abramović Method. Following a year during which reconnecting with ourselves has never been more important, I’m delighted to share these with the world on WeTransfer.”

The commission follows the artist’s guest curatorship on WePresent earlier in the year, during which she spotlighted five rising performance artists from around the world. Next, Abramović will launch her Time Capsule with the platform, unleashing ideas, references and objects through both the physical and digital format, devised to last beyond generations.

Holly Fraser, editor-in-chief of WePresent, says: “The pandemic has offered an opportunity for digital platforms such as WeTransfer to explore what is possible when bringing culture online. For a performance artist whose works exist primarily as experience, WeTransfer’s creation of The Abramovic Method in collaboration with the artist herself has given millions of people worldwide the opportunity to engage with an artistic practice developed from years of research, from their homes. We hope this digital experience of The Abramović Method unearths not only new connections to the artist’s legacy, but also ourselves and our inner potential.”

The Abramović Method is now live on the WeTransfer website as part of the artist’s year-long collaboration, commissioned by WePresent and designed by WeTransfer.