Marina Abramovich. Objects, Performance, Video, Sound. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

One of the great things about the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford is its modus operandi of either instigating or paying host to touring shows. Despite the name museum, the institution has no permanent collection, instead choosing to provide the citizens of Oxford with a varied selection of exhibitions five or six times per year.

In the case of Marina Abramovich, a Serbian conceptual artist and performer, visitors to the gallery are presented from the very beginning with an exceedingly strong statement. After buying your ticket, you enter the gallery straight into literally the firing line of a sound installation called “War”.

To enter the exhibition, you pass through a dark corridor, rather like a tent, whilst the very realistic sounds of gunfire appear at you from either side. It's a very stark and effective way to illustrate the terrors of war and in particular the harrowing nature of the spiritual attack that comes with the sounds of war. Gunfire has to personify the uncertainty of living and surviving in such an environment.

Elsewhere, the exhibition lives up to its name. There are examples of objects, performance, video, and sound. We can see photographs of past performances, objects installed in situ, and of course video art. 

The most striking of these is “Cleansing the Mirror”, a tower of television sets showing Abramovich ritualistically cleaning a dirty skeleton. The tower of television sets is as tall as a standard adult and we're presented up close with a metaphor for how history leaves a mark on the individual.

Abramovich embraces the skeleton like she would a child, scrubbing at it with soapy water and attempting to restore an emblem of death to some sort of pristine state. This isn't the act of an embalmer or a technician working as a taxidermist. 

It is instead almost a caring, nurturing exercise, cleansing, as the title implies, the skeleton of some kind of unknown burden that it had to endure, and that this somehow will help all of humanity, not just the lone individual for whom the skeleton represents.

Elsewhere there are crystals, puddles of pig's blood and whips made from Korean virgin's hair. The meanings behind these works are multiple and deep. To try and summarize them here would be discounting the experience of seeing them in person. 

I would urge anybody curious to visit this exhibition whilst it's on show at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford between 9th of April and the 2nd of July 1995.

Review by Francis Bookwood