A nude artist is suing New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for allegedly failing to prevent visitors from groping him during a Marina Abramović exhibition in 2010.
The work Imponderabilia, which was first staged in 1977 and was restaged in a retrospective of Abramović’s work at London’s Royal Academy of Arts last year, required two naked performers to stand face to face in a doorway, 18 inches apart, for more than an hour at a time while members of the public squeezed between them as they moved through the gallery.
In his lawsuit, John Bonafede claims to have been sexually assaulted on seven occasions by five different visitors while performing during the exhibition’s six-week run.
He claims the assaults were always conducted by older males and followed an “eerily similar” pattern, with the alleged perpetrators turning to face him before groping his genitals. Although Bonafede claims not to have reported the first incident out of shock, he says he told security and the exhibition’s stage manager about subsequent attacks. The lawsuit states that the museum “had actual knowledge of ongoing sexual assaults against many of its worker-performers in the exhibition, yet it intentionally and negligently failed to take corrective action to prevent the assaults from recurring”.
According to court documents, one of the alleged perpetrators was a MoMA corporate member, who had his membership revoked. But Bonafede claims that the museum did not reveal to him the identity of the men who assaulted him, which prevented him from pursuing charges against them.
At the time of the show, the museum put out a statement responding to press reports of models being groped. It read: “We are well aware of the challenges posed by having nude performers in the galleries. Any visitor who improperly touches or disturbs any of the performers is escorted from the museum by MoMA security.”
Bonafede is seeking unspecified damages in a jury trial.
