In 2010, curator Klaus Biesenbach told Marina Abramovic her idea wouldn't work in New York. Nobody, he said, would sit across from a stranger in silence for hours. They had places to be.
Abramovic sat anyway.
For three months at the Museum of Modern Art, the performance artist occupied a single chair in the atrium—present, still, watching. Visitors could choose to sit across from her, face to face, for as long as they wanted. No words. No instructions. Just two people looking at each other.
What Biesenbach thought would be empty chairs became something else entirely. Over 1,500 people came. Some stayed for minutes. Others sat for hours, many leaving visibly moved. The piece worked precisely because it was so deliberately simple—a radical act of attention in a building full of people trained to move quickly through galleries, glancing at labels, checking their phones.
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Start Your News DetoxThe Power of Presence
Critics noted something unexpected happening: teenagers stopped texting. Groups that had been chatting fell quiet. In a museum designed for efficient consumption of art, Abramovic created a space where the only thing to do was actually be present with another person. That constraint, it turned out, was the whole point.
Abramovic had been building toward this for decades. She and her former partner Ulay had spent years exploring performance as a medium—not theater, not spectacle, but the raw experience of being alive in front of witnesses. "The Artist Is Present" distilled that into its essence. No elaborate costume. No narrative arc. Just the transformative power of undivided attention.
Biesenbach, despite his initial skepticism, became one of the exhibition's strongest advocates. The piece became a landmark moment in contemporary art—proof that in an age of distraction, stillness itself could be radical.
Twelve years later, Abramovic restaged the performance to benefit relief efforts in Ukraine. The piece had lost nothing. If anything, in a world even more fragmented than 2010, sitting across from a stranger with no agenda felt more necessary, not less.
