Marina Abramović still recalls the moment she first heard the plaintive voice of opera singer Maria Callas emanating from the radio in her grandmother’s kitchen when she was a teenager. “I remember that I froze. Literally, time stopped, nothing was moving,” she recalled during a conversation with Nikolaus Bachler, the director of the Bayerische Staatsoper. “I put the radio on maximum, and this voice was just filling the space… There was electricity in the air.”

If you’ve never encountered the work of the late, great Maria Callas, she is perhaps the world’s most acclaimed opera singer ever to grace the stage. Known as La Davina for her reputation as a mercurial supreme diva, the chandelier-shattering voice of the American-Greek soprano embellished even opera’s most melodramatic parts with added pathos. The legacy of her performances and recordings is inextricably intertwined with that of her love life, which was as drama-infused as her on-stage roles. 

Having destroyed her marriage over an affair with the charismatic Greek multi-millionaire shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, Callas remained devoted to Onassis for the rest of her life, even when he married Jackie Kennedy. After many years of relative exile and isolation, Callas died of a heart attack in her apartment in Paris in 1977, aged just 53. Her voice had faded, and heartbreak and long-term extreme dieting had taken its toll.

Since that first experience in her grandma’s kitchen, Callas’ devastating, soaring tones continued to haunt Abramović throughout her life. So much so that in 2020, the artist created 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, an opera moving through seven climactic arias from beloved classics such as Tosca, La traviata and Norma, featuring costumes by Riccardo Tisci and films starring Abramović and Willem Dafoe. Six years later, these stirring short films are now on display in Copenhagen’s Cisternerne Gallery – a suitably atmospheric, crypt-like venue of endless vaulted spaces which once held an underground reservoir. 

Marina Abramović: Seven Deaths stars Abramović and Dafoe in a lavish, elaborate series of suicides, murders, and demises, accompanied by Callas’ beautiful, heartrending arias. From a dramatic, drawn-out leap from a skyscraper to the slow removal of a radiation suit, a majestic last consumptive gasp and a bouquet of strangulating snakes, each death is more remarkable than the last. Throughout, Dafoe is an arbiter of death; a harbinger of disaster; an embodiment of heartbreak.

There’s certainly a resonance between Abramović and Callas; the shared sensibility of two performers who each rush towards the discomforting and torturous experiences of life – heartbreak, physical endurance, risk – to inhabit the extremes and, through their work, explicate them for the rest of us. There is something very sensual and emotionally charged about both artists’ work. They are both deeply embodied in their practices, and they have both lived out private heartbreaks in public. 

Callas’ devastation over Onassis’ desertion was public knowledge. Abramović’s famous Great Wall Walk in 1988 involved a gruelling three–month–long walk to meet her lover and collaborator, Ulay, on the Great Wall of China to formally end their relationship – a hugely grand and respectful gesture which was marred by his impregnating his young Chinese guide en route.

In an interview with Dazed in 2020, Abramović said, “I was very much touched by Maria Callas. I had a very similar experience of a broken heart as she did. She died, but I didn’t die, and my work really saved me after that. I’ve always wanted to address this problem, and dying for love is something that is always there. As long as human beings exist, we all die. We all have at least one experience of loving so much that we want to die – or, we don’t die, but we have broken hearts.”

Where Callas succumbed to the grief of heartbreak, Abramović found restoration and catharsis through her work, and she hopes you can do the same when you experience these films. “It’s very romantic, but, at the same time, it needs to be cured. When you make something about your broken heart, and you go through these heavy emotions, you come out the other side healed. Healing is very important to me. One of the effects of this work should be that humans can always project their own feelings into this project, and they can heal. The broken heart takes time, but you can come to heal on the other side.”

In a statement accompanying the Cisternerne exhibition’s opening, the eminent performance artist says, “In opera as in life, death is stronger, love becomes absolute, pain becomes unbearable. It is not about dying once, it’s about dying many, many times. You die many times in life and yet you continue living. You give me your time, and I will die for you, seven times.”

Marina Abramović: Seven Deaths is running at Cisternerne in Copenhagen until 30 November 2026.