Marina Abramović: Seven Deaths

Seven Deaths is a cinematic opera installation by Marina Abramović in which the artist stages death through seven canonical female roles from opera. Each chapter is set to an aria performed by Maria Callas, forming a sequence of filmed tableaux in which Abramović appears alongside Willem Dafoe. The work draws on opera’s heightened emotional register to examine love, loss, fate, and endurance.

Presented at Cisternerne, the seven films are shown consecutively in a continuous one-hour installation. The staging has been adapted specifically for the site’s dark subterranean chambers, where the setting intensifies the atmosphere of ritual and theatricality.