OXFORD.- Modern Art Oxford announces It’s Me to the World, the fourth exhibition in KALEIDOSCOPE, its 50th anniversary programme. Featuring works by Marina Abramović, Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq, Dorothy Cross, Richard Long, Agnes Martin, Otobong Nkanga, Yoko Ono and Hannah Rickards, the show brings together artists from different generations who use the body and its relationship to nature to explore memory, space, the politics of representation, and the environment. The exhibition opened on 20 August and runs until 16 October and entry is free. From 17 October until 11 November, the galleries will still be open as this exhibition is gradually replaced by the next. Visitors are able to watch this transition as it happens.

The exhibition’s title is taken from a text by the artist Richard Long (b.1945): ‘My footsteps make the mark. My legs carry me across the country. It's like a way of measuring the world. I love that connection to my own body. It's me to the world.’

The show opens with Long’s remarkable installation Walking a Labyrinth, first created for Modern Art Oxford in 1971. An enormous rectilinear maze-like ‘floor drawing’ made from earth, it invites visitors to walk along its paths. One of Long’s first large-scale interior installations, forging a close relationship between the human body and the natural world, it is one of the highlights of this anniversary year.

Rising above Long’s labyrinth from the back wall is a new site-specific drawing by London-based artist Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq (b.1982). This vast black circle will be drawn directly on to the gallery wall with dense charcoal lines which radiate from the centre. Ashfaq’s drawings and sculptures draw on the traditions of Islamic art and 20th century western modernism.

The crackling sounds of thunder reverberate periodically throughout the exhibition. For Thunder (2006), Hannah Rickards (b.1979) worked with a composer to write an eight-minute orchestral score based on a seven-second recording of thunder claps. Rickards first exhibited this work as part of her solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2014.

In the next gallery stands Tsumeb Fragments (2015), a series of low tables topped with mineral fragments and photographs of equatorial scrubland. In this work Otobong Nkanga (b.Nigeria,1974) considers the ravaged landscapes of Namibia which have been excavated by mining companies. Nkanga’s performances, videos and sculptures critically appraise the ransacking of natural resources by colonial powers.

Acclaimed abstract artist Agnes Martin (b. Canada, 1912-2004) is represented by a series of 30 screen prints On A Clear Day (1973), first exhibited at Modern Art Oxford in 1975. With a body of work spanning 50 years, the artist employed a limited palette of pale colour washes combined with simple geometric forms. Presented alongside Nkanga’s sculpture, the prints speak to the sublime and transcendental properties of light and space.

Cloud Piece (1963) by Yoko Ono (b. Japan,1983) further underlines the metaphysical potential of art. This instruction work is printed on multiple sheets and offered to visitors to takeaway so that they can follow Ono’s thought-provoking directives wherever they wish.

Marina Abramović (b. Serbia, 1946) is renowned for a striking body of sculpture, film and performance which tests the limits of the body’s endurance and its relationship to audiences. A number of works from her 1995 Modern Art Oxford exhibition are on show, including Cleaning the Mirror I, a stack of five monitors each with a video of the artist scrubbing a skeleton clean. This is accompanied by a series of Black Dragon works which consist of three blocks each of green and rose quartz placed into the wall one over the other, at head, heart and groin height. With their gentle concave curves, the crystals are intended to accommodate the bodies of visitors and transfer healing properties.

Dorothy Cross (b.1956) presented delicate sculptures in the preceding KALEIDOSCOPE exhibition, Mystics and Rationalists, and these will re-emerge in another location for this exhibition, re-contextualised with the work of Abramović.

KALEIDOSCOPE Transition #3: From 17 October – 11 November, the galleries will still be open as one exhibition is gradually replaced by the next. Visitors are able to watch this process as it happens. The final exhibition in this year-long programme, The Vanished Reality runs from 12 November until 31 December 2016.