Seven Deaths is a cinematic opera installation in which the world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramović stages death through seven of the most iconic female roles in opera history.
Set to seven arias sung by the legendary opera diva Maria Callas, the work unfolds as a visually sumptuous and lavishly imagined filmic universe. Abramović herself assumes the female lead, appearing opposite Hollywood actor Willem Dafoe. The result is a fascinating and deeply immersive narrative of love and loss, life and death, longing and suffering. Seven Deaths is a raw and powerful exploration of the fundamental conditions of human existence – identity, destiny, and the great universal emotions that bind them.
At Cisternerne, audiences experience the seven films as a continuous sequence with a total running time of approximately one hour. This marks the first time the work has been unfolded fully in time and space, in a staging created specifically for Cisternerne’s dark, subterranean chambers.