MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ — Boat Emptying, Stream Entering, Victoria Miro, London, 1989

Marina Abramović. Boat Emptying, Stream Entering. Victoria Miro, London, 15 April–12 May 1989. Exhibition invitation. Offset-printed on card; 21 × 14 cm. Colour photograph of reddish masonry to recto with artist name in widely spaced white capitals; solid blue ground with italicised title text to verso.

A document of a genuine hinge in Abramović’s practice. After twelve years of working with Ulay, their collaboration ended with The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk in 1988. By 1989 Abramović had returned to working independently, and Boat Emptying, Stream Entering belongs to the first phase of that renewed solo practice — not a continuation of the extreme body-based performances for which she had become known, but a significant move from the artist’s body toward the object, material and eventually the viewer’s body.

The exhibition produced the early Transitory Objects, including White Dragon: Standing, Red Dragon: Sitting and Green Dragon: Lying — works made from patinated copper, quartz and obsidian that required the viewer to stand, sit or lie against them. The Centre Pompidou acquired the three-part 1989 installation the following year. Contemporary scholarship relates the title to emptying the mind through meditation, the “stream” becoming the energy of the Wall and of nature: a process of renewal emerging from the dissolution of the Ulay partnership.

The invitation’s design carries the same transition. The recto is almost entirely physical: a close photograph of reddish masonry recalling the material surface of the Great Wall. The verso abandons the image completely for an artificial blue field and the italicised words Boat Emptying / Stream Entering… Wall and stream; matter and energy; image and language. The card doesn’t merely announce the exhibition — its two surfaces reproduce the conceptual movement of the work.

Not the canonical 1970s endurance performer, not yet the globally institutionalised figure of the 1990s and 2000s, but an artist actively reconstructing a solo practice after the dissolution of one of performance art’s defining collaborations. A small administrative object from the moment one artistic identity was being emptied and another allowed to enter.

Condition: good to very good. Light handling and edge wear; shallow vertical crease visible to verso, consistent with circulation.

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