Marina Abramovic: The Kitchen

The Kitchen: Homage to Saint Therese is a set of portrait photographs and videos of the “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic (born 1946). Shot in the abandoned space of a kitchen where Carthusian nuns had once fed more than 8,000 orphans, Abramovic is here seen cooking and meditating. Referencing Renaissance painting and the writings of Saint Therese of Ávila, in which the sixteenth-century nun describes her experiences of mystical levitation in church and kitchen, The Kitchen is equally an autobiographical work. “In my childhood,” Abramovic explains, “the kitchen of my grandmother was the center of my world [...] all my best memories come from there.” Accompanying this book’s images is a series of the artist’s own spiritual recipes: a series of haikus, prayers and mantras to liberate the mind from the confused flow of thinking.