Marina Abramović
For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, internationally known as the "godfather" of avant-garde cinema, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.
Thirty years after their separation, performance artists Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe 'Ulay' Laysiepen (1943-2020) agree to meet, for the first time on camera, for a raw and honest conversation about their life, art and legacy.
In the summer of 2014, tens of thousands of guests flocked to the Serpentine Gallery in London to experience Marina Abramović’s exhibition ‘512 Hours’. But when it opened, it dawned on everyone that the audience itself was the actual work in the iconic performance artist’s landmark exhibition. The audience members were also active participants and co-creators of the social experiment, which - set against the minimalist background of the gallery’s empty space - developed continuously into new, unpredictable directions during the three weeks (or 512 hours) in which the exhibition took place, while Abramović herself took part in the performative ritual.
Over six decades, Richard Demarco CBE, the Scottish artist and iconic promoter has brought 1000s of artists to the Edinburgh Festival and launched the careers of some of the most famous names in contemporary art. Yet today, Demarco struggles to make ends meet and is out of favour with the modern art wold. The film discusses how art has been commodified in society by dominant forces. How can society remedy the absence of art in the lives of those who feel excluded? Demarco wants to put this right before his final breath!
A secret Soviet Institute conducts scientific and occult experiments on animals and human beings to create the perfect person. The KGB general and his aides turn a blind eye to erotic adventures of the director of the Institute, scandalous debauches of prominent scientists and their cruel and insane research. One day, a radical ultra right-wing group arrives in the laboratory under the guise of test subjects. They get a task - to eradicate the decaying elements of the Institute’s community, and if needs be, destroy the fragile world of secret Soviet science.
The occasion is “The Cleaner,” a travelling retrospective exhibition of work by Marina Abramović, whose final destination is Belgrade, the artist’s hometown. It contemplates her whole life, including dilemmas from her youth in Belgrade, misguided love affairs and a special kind of loneliness. It centres around re-performance as a phenomenon. Who are re-performers?
Performance artist Marina Abramovic invites Alan Yentob into her home, opens her archive, travels to her birthplace in Belgrade and talks about turning her life into art.
7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a continuation of Marina Abramovic's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century as her life was beset by struggle and scandal. Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer's most important roles - in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Norma - followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself.
A vision for a world free of pollution and climate problems, with energy available in abundance - are we ready to take up legacy of ingenious inventor Nikola Tesla?
A materially successful young man, riddled with anxiety embarks on a worldwide journey of self inquiry, uncovering deep truths about who and what he is.
A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.
A 30 years odyssey: the world's most intriguing artists and thinkers from the fields of visual art, music, filmmaking, acting, literature, philosophy, politics, business and science, are asked the same question: "Why are you creative?"
Legendary couple in performance art – Marina Abramović and Ulay – lived together for 12 years and made pioneering work as a duo. In this extraordinary double interview the artists looks back on their relationship – from their first meeting in 1975 until now.
In between performance, dance and cerémonies, "The Ferryman” is a choreographic exploration of rituals and animistic roots, a luxurious visualisation of a bewitchment and an exorcism of a man-deer in the borders of the world.
Director Francesco Carrozzini creates an intimate portrait of his mother, Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue. From the ridiculous to the sublime, her astonishing but often controversial magazine covers have not only broken the rules but also set the high bar for fashion, art and commerce over the past 25 years. From the legendary “Black Issue" and the “Plastic Surgery issue" Sozzani remains deeply committed to exploring subject matter off limits to most in order to shake up the status quo and occasionally redefine the concept of beauty.
Marina Abramović travels through Brazil, in search of personal healing and artistic inspiration, experiencing sacred rituals and revealing her creative process. The route is comprised of poignant encounters with healers and sages from the Brazilian countryside, exploring the limits between art and spirituality. This external trip triggers in Marina a profound introspective journey through memories, pain and past experiences.
She is the godmother of performance art. With her shocking public actions she created in the late 60s images that have burned into the general visual memory until today. The life and work of the Austrian artist Valie Export exemplify a development in art history in which women sought and found new ways and means of expression. Her work provides a feminist counterpart to the Viennese actionism of her time, which has influenced numerous artists of subsequent generations. The innovative diversity of her artistic approaches makes Valie Export an icon of 20th century art history.
Bouncing between Europe and the United States as often as she would between lovers, Peggy Guggenheim’s life was as swirling as the design of her uncle’s museum, and reads more like fiction than any reality imaginable. Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict offers a rare look into Guggenheim’s world: blending the abstract, the colorful, the surreal and the salacious, to portray a life that was as complex and unpredictable as the artwork Peggy revered and the artists she pushed forward.
Filmmaker Hermann Vaske explores the creative Balkan world in the hopes of understanding the meaning of "Balkan spirit".
Ulay is a conceptual artist whose photography pushed boundaries, and whose love affair with Marina Abramovic produced some of the best pieces of performance art. Diagnosed with cancer shortly after agreeing to film the documentary, Ulay's illness informs Project Cancer, which is part-retrospective, part-visual document of the year he believed could be the last of his extraordinary life.
Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
This hourlong semi-documentary records the musical stage collaboration between director Robert Wilson and veteran performance artist Marina Abramovic. Also included is a wealth of background material about Abramovic's life and earlier works.
Filmed over the course of two years, Our City Dreams is the story of a woman's struggles and successes as an artist in New York City. Told through five women artists, from youngest to oldest, the film features Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, and Nancy Spero. From the studio to the streets of New York, from the canals of Venice to the alleys of Cairo and the beaches of Phuket, Our City Dreams takes us deep into the artists' worlds.
In a small house with oversized furniture, located in a rice field in Asia, some children wearing army clothes and weapons, start playing war, creating between each other two armies and using children's toys, laser weapons, machine guns and helicopters. Slowly, as the game progresses, they start imitating war scenes as seen on TV, such as negotiations and death scenes. At the end of the film, the children are coming out of the house and they deposit their weapons in front of it. The smallest child comes out in the end with a burning bramble stick in his hand and lights the pile of weapons. All the children leave while the pile is burning. In over twenty countries around the world, children are direct participants in war. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces in current armed conflicts. Dangerous Games is a work of fiction.
For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance. The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 –15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.
A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality.
Balkan Erotic Epic explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.
Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rather than a mechanical reproduction of the artist's work, the film tries to create a new reality by translating the performances into cinematographic images that intensify the fictional context of the film. Abramovic plays herself, but ,appearing in multiple forms, blurs her own identity. Memories and fantasies intermingle with day to day rituals. The chronological narrative often breaks to reflect the interior voyage of the protagonist from the present to the past and back to the present. The result is a visually impressive film. Balkan Baroque had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 1999.
Documents four of Abramovic's solo works, exercises in which her body is the vehicle for a rigorous testing of the self — violently brushing her hair and her face, vocalizing until she can no longer breathe, intoning a stream-of-consciousness flow of memories, moving to a drumbeat until she literally drops from exhaustion.
In the twilight years of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese filmmaker slowly becoming blind tours the country screening her last film to peasants. In it, the woman imagines two "alien" lovers walking from end-to-end along the Great Wall to join each other in the middle, one last time. This documentary is an adaptation of Ulay and Marina Abramovic's final collaborative project, the 1988 performance "The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk."
Marina Abramovic collaborated with videomaker Charles Atlas on this striking work of autobiographical performance. Abramovic delivers a monologue that traces a concise personal chronology. This brief narrative history, which references her past in the former Yugoslavia, her performance work, and her collaboration with and separation from Ulay, is intercut with images of Abramovic engaged in symbolic gestures and ritual acts—scrubbing her feet, staring like Medusa as snakes writhe on her head. Closing her litany with the phrase "time past, time present," Abramovic invokes the personal and the mythological in a poignant affirmation of self.
Combining video, performance art, documentary, and tableau vivant, this short piece set in what appears to be part of the Ayutthaya Ruins in Bangkok, Thailand, begins with a panoramic shot of various Thai folks dressed in traditional garb and sleeping in the grass as a woman narrates. The rest of the piece is broken into six unbroken shots of these individuals in still poses depicting both some aspect of Thai life as well as suggesting its disquieting alienation from modernity, as the same woman narrator now sings. The final shot is again of the ensemble sleeping, suggesting that the previous montage was, indeed, a collective dream.
Ulay and Abramovic draw a large bow and arrow, one holding each side. The arrowhead is pointing at Abramovic's heart. The slightest movement could be fatal. Microphones on their clothes pick up their quickening heart beats and Ulay's irregular breathing
Produced by De Appel, Amsterdam, while General Idea was in residence there, Test Tube was conceived as a program for television. Presented under the brand "The Color Bar Lounge," a cocktail bar in the mythical 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, the program is a hybrid of popular television formats […] and infomercial. […] Advertisements for the bar are placed throughout the program; a loaded word choice, full of double-entendres and innuendo, betrays the influence of both Dadaism and consumerism. This collapse of popular and high culture is central to General Idea's agenda, as Felix Partz observes: "You know, the mass media are like a vast pharmaceutical complex developing new cultural elixirs of an unprecedented intoxication…but art remains a curious and elitist drink. Despite its unique flavor and heady cultural properties, it has never effectively been exploited."
Marina Abramovic's performance 'Relation in time', with her long time partner Ulay. "We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair, without any movement for 16 hours. Then the audience came in. We continued sitting for one hour."
"Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose which one of us to face" – Marina Abramovich
I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat 'Art must be beautiful', 'Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face.
Award-winning choreographer Alexander Ekman dives into the subject of creativity by meeting scientists, professors, artists, film directors and choreographers, with the goal of trying to understand every aspect of the phenomenon.
This one-take, 3-D film majestically documents legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic, capturing the breadth of space in infinite detail: the life of an artist, her keen sense of transition, a space's decay, and the ripeness of rebirth.
Ulay and Abramović take turns hitting each other in the face, gradually increasing speed and intensity with each blow. This performance is best known for being the inspiration for New Order's "True Faith" music video.
