Nuptiae Mysticae by Marta Jovanovic in Fitzrovia Chapel, London
As part of London Gallery Weekend, Gallery Rosenfeld’s Riccardo Freddo will present Mystical Wedding, a new three-hour durational performance by internationally recognised Serbian artist Marta Jovanović. The contemporary rite of mystical marriage between artist and curator, Cristiano Leone, President of the Museo Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, will take place at Fitzrovia Chapel on Friday, June 5th from 6:30pm to 9:30pm.
Mystical Wedding / Nuptiae Mysticae
As part of London Gallery Weekend, Gallery Rosenfeld will present Mystical Wedding, a new three-hour durational performance by internationally recognised Serbian artist Marta Jovanović. The contemporary rite of mystical marriage between artist and curator, Cristiano Leone, President of the Museo Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, will take place at Fitzrovia Chapel on Friday, June 5th from 6:30pm to 9:30pm.
The performance stages a fictional wedding ceremony between artist and curator through ritual actions written vows poetry readings and acts of endurance. Visitors can enter throughout the evening as the performance unfolds and it will conclude outside of the chapel with the live tattooing of a line across their hands symbolising their wedding bond.
Conceived specifically for Fitzrovia Chapel the project draws on the historical idea of the “mystical wedding” while responding to the Chapel’s origins as the spiritual centre of the former Middlesex Hospital. It also establishes a dialogue with Fondazione Antico Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala—one of Europe’s oldest hospitals now led by Leone—creating a layered exchange between performance, care, institutional memory and sacred architecture. Through the artist-curator relationship Nuptiae Mysticae explores trust, vulnerability, authorship and the endurance of artistic collaboration over time.
About Marta Jovanović:
Serbian performance artists Marta Jovanović is widely recognised as one of the most important female performance artists working today. She is a performance artist, researcher and educator whose work explores the body, endurance, ritual and feminist identity through live performance and installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at Kunstpalast and she was an artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute. She is currently Professor and Head of the Visual Arts Department at RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts.
