The celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović will issue her first NFT drop for three years when Marina Abramović Element (MAE), created by Abramović in partnership with the curated digital art marketplace TAEX, goes live on Ethereum blockchain in May.
The project is made up of three NFT drops, designed to immerse people in Abramović’s distinctive practice through both interactive elements and new artworks. MAE will be previewed at Moco Museum, in central London, on 8 April, with the NFT drops going live in stages between mid-May and November. At Moco, Abramović tells The Art Newspaper, visitors “will see myself, the beginning, the reason why I was made”.
Abramović says that she sees non-fungible tokens (NFTs)—11 years on from their inception and four years since the first boom in their market—as one way that art can be made accessible to a larger audience in an age when art is becoming “more of a commodity, accessible just to rich people”. Her own métier, performance art, she says, has “since the beginning… been more democratic”.
Animations that adapt to the cycles of the Moon
The collection is based on a fictional story, written by Abramović, derived from her philosophy and life story, and developed by TAEX. It is made up of three core NFT drops—Art, Life, and Marina Abramović Method—each inspired by different aspects of the artist and her work, and a final The Great Mint. In each drop, there are three levels of tokens: one is connected to still images, another to animations, while “Epic” tokens link to animations that adapt to the cycles of the Moon in real-time.
The presence of files that adapt in real time aligns the collection with a classic format in the maturing NFT market, where pieces of algorithmic or generative art—dating back to pieces such as Autoglyphs from 2019—are tokenised on the blockchain and often sit inside the NFT's contract of ownership. It is a format well aligned with the blockchain as a permanent ledger, and catalogue, of files, designed to be revisited and re-experienced; where an algorithm might be triggered to run by a calendar prompt or other interactivity. In 2025 artists are presenting, as NFTs, generative art pieces that are ever more sophisticated in function or aesthetic and never the same in any two instances.
The evolution of Abramović's practice
The NFT drop Art, launching in mid-May, focuses on the evolution of the artist’s practice, featuring animals, objects, and the contexts that shape her work. Life, landing in June, coalesces locations and gestures in her work. Marina Abramović Method, available in September, touches on the artist’s pursuit of self-discovery, which resulted in the founding in 2012 of the Marina Abramović Institute, a non-profit foundation focusing on performance, long durational works, and the eponymous “Abramović Method”.
Collectors who acquire aspects of all three drops qualify for a culminating The Great Mint in November where some of the tokens will be linked to video artworks or extended animations that present new versions of the artist’s best-known pieces, performed by an avatar of Abramović.
"Working today with technology and creating my own avatar,” Abramović says in a statement issued this week, “is a way to develop a new relationship between the performer and the public.”
Asked if she sees NFTs as a way to reach new audiences, she tells The Art Newspaper that “technology is the way the young generation communicates”. “Doing NFTs today is really [a means] to create a bridge between performance practice and the young generation”.
Abramović’s first NFT drop in 2022
“This entire technology is very new to me,” Abramović says of the blockchain, “and I am still learning and making baby steps to fully understand how fundamentally new these concepts are. I am in the process of doing it and I still am understanding the immensity of the ideas coming through.”
Her first artistic venture on the blockchain was The Hero 25FPS, an NFT drop, made in 2022, under what she describes as “specific circumstances”. In it she sold each frame from her 2001 film The Hero, a piece that had been made in memory of her father. People were invited to buy either a single frame (as a .jpg file) or a sequence of frames (as a .gif file)—”to acquire time” as she put it. “I am selling each individual frame of The Hero (2001) as part of The Hero 25FPS, which stands for frames per second,” she wrote in The Art Newspaper in 2022. “As with all my work, the audience completes the work.”
The maturing NFT market
The Hero 25FPS was minted at a time when the NFT market was still close to the level of activity that it enjoyed when Beeple’s Everydays—The First 5000 Days was sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s in March 2021. Asked whether the market for NFTs has matured in the years following the collapse in prices in late 2022, TAEX says in a statement that it has “definitely became more sensible. A lot of projects got filtered out and did not survive the market crash, which gave way to a now more stable digital art market which includes NFTs as a tool to showcase, collect and engage with artistic narratives.”
The blockchain as catalogue raisonné
Asked in 2025 whether she sees the blockchain as a future home for her catalogue raisonné— in relation to the artist Robert Alice’s comment to The Art Newspaper in 2024 that the blockchain is the “world's ultimate catalogue raisonné… the world’s first truly decentralised public library"—Abramović said, “I am definitely looking into these possibilities.” “Digging into the archives of Marina Abramović’s performances and methods both online and offline really gave our team a similar feeling to building a catalogue raisonné,” TAEX said in a statement. “However, with a twist, given that this project also incorporates the future, the continuation and the resonance of her work, and gives the world an opportunity to survey her Element.”
“Everyone is free to interpret the project”
Asked what she hopes the art world will take away from the Element project, Abramović says: “I will do my best and everyone is free to interpret the project.” And she adds: “When I get these questions I always remember the famous Kurosawa movie Rashomon. There were seven people at the same time in the forest and everyone saw something. When they sat around the fire and assembled the stories, they were very different.”
“Things have dramatically changed” since 2022, Abramović says. “I think that right now for me the most important [thing] is the journey and to see where it brings me, what experiences I will have from this and what kind of work will be created.”
