Jenny Hval The Artist is Absent (2025)
In 2010, Marina Abramović sat in silence at the MoMA—day after day, hour after hour. “The Artist is Present” stripped performance down to its most basic elements: time, body, space. One chair, one gaze, no mediation. Yet this minimal setup carried the weight of a career devoted to testing the limits of the body and the ethics of spectatorship. Since the 1970s, Abramović has been enacting pain, proximity and endurance as forms of aesthetic inquiry. At MoMA, she withdrew action almost entirely, transforming sheer presence into a durational experiment in vulnerability, exposure and human connection.
In 2025, Norwegian singer and composer Jenny Hval replied with “The Artist is Absent”. Her song sketches an empty stage: “Around an empty space / A club without a club / The artist is absent / They have left the building,” she sings—a nod to Elvis perhaps? Or a quiet refusal to be endlessly visible? Either way, the track is shimmering, strange and intimate—maybe less about disappearance than about resisting the demand to appear, to perform, to be legible at all times. With Abramović in mind, Hval opens a space where presence and absence are not opposites but part of the same gesture.
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