At Saatchi Yates, London, Marina Abramović presents a bold reconfiguration of two seminal works, Blue Period and Red Period, transforming moving image into stillness. The show is on view until 31st October and deals with performance and archive.

In this ambitious new iteration, Abramović deconstructs her original video performances into a constellation of 1,200 photographic stills, each available as a unique work. The gesture is both analytical and intimate: an invitation to inhabit the micro-moments that constitute her performances, to witness the thresholds of emotion and endurance that have long defined her practice.

Echoing the chromatic epochs of Picasso’s Blue Period and Matisse’s Red Period, Abramović’s Blue and Red works explore colour as emotional terrain, in her words “red as seduction, danger, vitality; blue as distance, introspection, and fragility”.

Originally part of the artist’s Video Portrait Gallery (1975–2002), first realised at Kunstmuseum Bern and later shown at the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2015), these works find new life in still form. By enveloping the gallery in hundreds of sequential images, Saatchi Yates offers an immersive environment exploring motion.

Through this visceral metamorphosis from video to photograph, Abramović continues her lifelong pursuit: to capture the presence that lingers after performance, and to locate transcendence in the quiet tension between movement and stillness.

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