The Museum of Modern Art in New York responded to the artist’s lawsuit about harassment at the Abramovich exhibition

John Bonafede during the performance

Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reacted to the artist’s accusations John Bonafede in harassing him during the artist exhibition Maryna Abramovich “The artist is present” in 2010.

Bonafede sued MoMA last month. In the lawsuit, he noted that he participated in an updated version of the performance Imponderabilia (1977) – during which he and another performer stood naked in a doorway through which visitors had to squeeze to get to the next gallery.

The lawsuit alleges that during the exhibition, the artist was sexually assaulted seven times by five male visitors, each of whom “groped the plaintiff’s genitals.” Bonafede also claims to have seen a female performer undergo a similar attack. He noted that these harassments caused “years of emotional suffering and caused significant damage to his mental health, body, image and career“.

On Tuesday, February 27, the museum denied wrongdoing, and its attorney filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

“While occasional contact was to be expected, MoMA has prescribed procedures by which performers must report any problems. MoMA hired a manager who served as a liaison between the performers and MoMA curators. Performers and MoMA staff created an alarm system to alert security if performers were touched inappropriately, protocols for which were included in the Performers Guide“, the statement says.

The museum claims Bonafede was informed of the manager’s assaults and was told to stop participating. However, he did not take advantage of this opportunity, MoMA said.

About Maryna Abramovych and her exhibition at MoMA

Maryna Abramovych is a Serbian artist who works in the genres of performance, photography, sculpture and many others. Winner of the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale in 1997 for the performance “Balkan Baroque” – in which she manually washed a pile of bones in memory of the victims of the Yugoslav wars.

The performances created by her explore human problems and require physical and psychological endurance. Therefore, recently, due to his age, Abramovich does not always participate in his own performances, involving selected people.

Exhibition “The artist is present” (The Artist is Present) in 2010 became the first retrospective of performance art at MoMA. She was very popular and remembered for the titular performance, in which Abramovich sat at a table in the atrium of the museum, and the visitors sat across from her.

In addition to the artist, 38 artists took part in the exhibition at MoMA, who took turns replacing each other in different parts of the exhibition: lying under the skeleton, standing facing each other in the doorway, etc.

Performance Imponderabilia at MoMA differed from the original 1977 version, which had a narrower doorway. At MoMA, larger doors were installed to allow visitors in wheelchairs to pass through. “I felt that the work suffered a lot from this“, Abramovich said in an interview with the New York Times in September 2023.