Marina Abramović, the Serbian artist long hailed as the “grandmother of performance art,” has announced her latest NFT project, Marina Abramović Element (MAE), in collaboration with TAEX. The project unfolds across three NFT drops – Art, Life, and Marina Abramović Method – starting with the first in May 2025 and culminating in November with The Great Mint, where participants can mint the collection’s rarest tokens, dubbed "5D MAE."
MAE builds on a fictional narrative, crafted by Abramović and expanded by TAEX, piecing together her personal and artistic journey through the digital works. Each drop features NFTs of varying rarity: still-image Ordinary tokens, animated Rare tokens, and dynamic Epic tokens synced to real-time lunar cycles.
To access The Great Mint, collectors must acquire a specific combination of NFTs from these drops plus Transformational Crystals, earned through a gaming component tied to the project. At this final stage, the rarest tokens acquirable will be either one-minute video pieces or new animations of Abramović’s digital avatar reinterpreting her iconic performances.
Abramović sees MAE as a natural evolution of her practice. “Working today with technology and creating my own avatar is a way to develop a new relationship between the performer and the public,” she stated. She envisions the project as a means to distill performance art’s ephemeral nature into a lasting digital form, turning it into something more tangible for a new younger generation to experience.
A preview at London’s Moco Museum on 8 April 2025, with Abramović in attendance, will offer an early look at he project before the May launch.
