The Netherlands Media Art Institute is happy to announce the news of the first large-scale performance retrospective of the work of Marina Abramovic in the United States. The exhibition Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present will take place at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from March 14 - May 31.
Since her arrival in the Netherlands in the 1970's NIMk has been the gallery where Marina works on her video artworks. In 2003 NIMk organised her first Dutch solo exhibition. NIMk is also the distributor of all the video works in the exhibition.
We congratulate Marina with the MoMA exhibition and live reperformances of her work!
Please visit www.moma.org for more information about the exhibition, or see below.
The Museum of Modern Art presents Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, the first large-scale scale American museum retrospective of the artist’s groundbreaking performance work, from March 14 to May 31, 2010. Internationally recognized as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Marina Abramovic (Yugoslav, b. 1946) uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being. The exhibition traces Abramovic’s prolific career with approximately 50 works spanning over four decades of interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photography, solo performances, and collaborative performances. Also included are the world premiere of a new work to be performed by Abramovic herself and “reperformances” of influential historical pieces by performers selected especially for this exhibition. The live reperformances are included in a chronological installation of the artist’s work reflecting the different modes of representing, documenting, and exhibiting her ephemeral time- and media-based works. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large.
Abramovic, best known for her durational works, has created a new work for this performance retrospective—The Artist Is Present (2010)—that she will perform daily throughout the run of the exhibition, for a total of over 700 hours. For her longest solo piece to date, Abramovic will sit in silence at a table in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium during public hours, passively inviting visitors to take the seat across from her for as long as they choose within the timeframe of the Museum’s hours of operation. Although she will not respond, participation by Museum visitors completes the piece and allows them to have a personal experience with the artist and the artwork.
The historical exhibition in the Museum’s sixth-floor galleries will feature live reperformances of five landmark Abramovic performance pieces, alongside video and photographic documentation of the original performances, incorporated within a chronological presentation of the artist’s career. The works are Imponderabilia (1977/2010), in which a nude performers stand opposite each other in a doorway, so that visitors who wish to pass must move through the gap between the two, deciding who to face; Relation in Time (1977/2010), in which two performers sit quietly, connected to each other by their long hair, which is tied together; Point of Contact (1980/2010), in which two performers stand face to face with arms bent, just barely touching the tip of each other’s index fingers; Nude with Skeleton (2002–05/2010), in which a nude performer lies beneath a skeleton, animating it with the motions of his or her breathing; and Luminosity (1997/2010), in which a nude performer, suspended high upon a wall and immersed in light, gives the appearance of floating before the wall. Imponderabilia, Relation in Time, and Point of Contact were originally created and performed by Abramovic and the artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen, German, b. 1943), her partner from 1975 to 1988. A group of 39 performers chosen by Abramovic will reperform these pieces continuously in shifts throughout public hours in the sixth floor galleries. These reperformances will take place alongside video and photographic documentation of the original performances, and they will be incorporated within the chronological presentation of the artist’s career on the sixth floor, broken up into four sections. These sections feature photographs, video, sound recordings, and, in some cases, the original objects used in the performances. For more information, please visit www.moma.org.
