Marina Abramovic bans mobile phones from latest exhibition

Visitors to an exhibition by a leading performance artist will be banned from taking in mobile phones and other electrical devices to make sure they do not “distract themselves” from the show.

At a press conference to launch her 512 exhibition, Marina Abramovic said she did not want people to take photographs of things “they don’t even experience”.

The Belgrade-born artist, 67, will spend eight hours a day at London’s Serpentine Gallery for the duration of her exhibition, which features the artist leading the audience by the hand, whispering to them and giving instructions. Abramovic will even unlock and close the white-walled London gallery herself.

Entry to the exhibition, which opens tomorrow and lasts for 10 weeks, will be free but just 160 members of the public will be admitted at any one time. Each can stay as long as they wish.

The limit on numbers has been set by the number of lockers in the gallery foyer, where visitors must leave electronic devices or anything that might distract them from the experience as it happens.

“In these lockers they can put their BlackBerries and phones and camera and computers and watches,” the artist said. “We don’t want people to come here and phone and blog and tweet before they have even seen it, as they do all the time.

“We want people to come as they are, with nothing, as I am. From then we will see what is going to happen. From that energy, every day is different.”

The exhibition is Abramovic’s first major performance work since she appeared at New York’s Museum Of Modern Art in 2010, with The Artist Is Present, in which she sat in silence for three months while visitors were invited to gaze into her eyes. In London, she will be aided by a team of 45 black-clad “guards”, who will ensure her welfare. She said she may choose to use some props – including chairs, tables and mirrors – although much of each day will be spent on her feet. She added: “In my case it is the wrong concept to say I am doing nothing. I’m doing lots. The only nothing is in the space, the space is empty but actually I am working eight hours a day, every single day.”

New York-based Abramovic, who will wear a simple outfit from a palette of just black and white each day, will take no rests other than lavatory breaks.

She said she had some concerns about how a British audience will react.

“The British public is different. You’re cynical, you really like the bad jokes and you drink too much at the weekends, so I am very worried about your public – the only way that I can win here, the British public, is to be extremely vulnerable and humble, that I am there for you at this impossible moment.”

She had said she knew it was a risk and had factored in the possibility of “failure”, but she wanted to push herself.

Abramovic had already meticulously planned another exhibition but she felt something was wrong and awoke one night with the idea of doing away with everything, which was accepted by the gallery’s director Julia Peyton-Jones.

“For me it was important to do something I had never done before, to go to the territory I had never entered. I woke up in the night and I was completely sweating and I thought ‘oh my God, can I do that?’ I said to them OK, I think we should have empty space. My main material is going to be the public. From that something is going to happen, there is going to be an energy level, there is nothing on the walls.”