Marina Abramovic: Healing Frequency at Moco Museum

21^st March 2025

Constance A

Constance A

21 March 2025

If one intends to go shopping in London, one is likely to be funnelled into the vortex that is Oxford Street, where the air is thick with retail desperation and every Londoner seems to have been conscripted into a weekend pilgrimage – takeaway drink in hand, eyes glazed over. But few know that tucked just beyond the mayhem, near the knotted intersection of Marble Arch, there’s a curious and glossy pink anomaly: an art museum.

The Moco Museum – short for “modern contemporary” – has already staked its claim in Amsterdam and Barcelona. In London, the museum has opened a flagship space in what might be the most central location imaginable, mere footsteps from Marble Arch itself. It has reportedly welcomed an illustrious lineup of visitors: Venus Williams, Barack Obama, Steven Spielberg and Dua Lipa, among others. Its origin story is sleek: founded in 2016 by Kim and Lionel Logchies Prins as an independent museum “for enthusiasts and art lovers alike”, Moco positions itself as a “heart-led and considered decision” – a philanthropic gesture aimed at enriching the area, which for sure, could use a cultural pulse amid the consumerist frenzy.

Arriving at Moco is, in its way, a palate cleanser. Calming music plays. Light pours through tall windows. Familiar, colourful artworks line the walls, offering that quietly smug sensation of recognition – “Oh yes, I know this one”. The museum spreads across three floors, each one thematically organised, like a kind of curated Instagram feed of the contemporary canon. Here is Jeff Koons’s inflatable dolphin. There is Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkin. A white Porsche with blue calcite and quartz crystals, courtesy of Daniel Arsham. Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat – all the iconic names of modernism and postmodernism assembled in one place, as if by algorithm.

Text panels on the wall offer snippets of context, or you can scan QR codes for further insights. The accompanying commentary is refreshingly accessible – a nod to the museum’s mission of serving up a digestible, greatest-hits sampler of the contemporary art world. Upstairs, the big names continue. Tracey Emin, Banksy KAWS and – unexpectedly – Robbie Williams, better known for his stadium-filling ballads than brushwork. Here, Williams is introduced as a reinvented figure, a pop icon turned introspective visual artist, producing “self-loving angels” as a kind of emotional exorcism. It’s peculiar, yes, but oddly fitting in a space that delights in the cult of celebrity.

One of the more engaging sections is Marina Abramović’s temporary exhibition, Healing Frequency. A suite of around ten works invites viewers into a collective state of healing. In recent years, Abramović has deftly merged performance art with personal branding, expanding into self-help and even skincare. Her inclusion here feels inevitable, almost meta: she has, after all, become one of the art world’s most commercially successful figures.

The basement is darker, moodier, more immersive. There’s Daniel Arsham’s meditative Lunar Garden (2024), glowing like some alien zen retreat, and a room dedicated to NFTs, because of course there is.

For those steeped in contemporary art, Moco may read as a kind of spectacle: a crash course in the canon of fame. It is, in many ways, the “Most Watched” section of the Netflix of modern art. The museum’s own website invites you to “interact with iconic works from the artists that are now ruling the art world”. One might reasonably feel disheartened by the recycling of the same names, the same works, the same glossy narratives – all too easily monetised, endlessly repeated.

And yet: there’s a reason these artists are famous. Their work is eye-catching, emotionally charged, often resonant, and almost always photogenic. Yes, it may all verge on cash grab, and the carefully staged backdrops do lend themselves to influencer content, but Moco offers something rare in the London art landscape: it provides a space where one can encounter major works of contemporary art without the opacity of the commercial gallery circuit. It is digestible, friendly, stylish and accessible – if you can afford the £23 ticket…

The gift shop is as curated as the galleries, all pastel tones and high-design objects. One wishes, perhaps, for a café. But with nearly every major coffee chain just around the corner, its absence feels more like a missed opportunity than a pressing concern.

In the end, the Moco Museum is a candy-pink paradox: part pop-up, part pilgrimage, equal parts commerce and culture. And in the middle of Oxford Street’s capitalist carnival, that may be precisely what London needs.

Constance Ayrton
Photo: Courtesy of Marina Abramovic/Moco Museum

Marina Abramovic: Healing Frequency is at Moco Museum from 11^th September 2024 until 21^st April 2025. For further information or to book visit the exhibition’s website here.