Marina Abramović

The final part of the Creativity Trilogy explores existential threats our world is facing. An inspiring film about imagination's power and a hopeful glimpse into the future.

An exposé on how Hollywood and the mainstream media manipulate the multitudes by spreading propaganda throughout their content.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A probing portrait of Chris Burden, an artist who took creative expression to the limits and risked his life in the name of art.

Simon de Pury is a familiar face in the art world. The former chairman of Sotheby’s has a larger-than-life personality and is known as the «Mick Jagger of auctions.»

Storyteller and Conceptual Magician Derek DelGaudio attempts to understand the illusory nature of identity and answer the deceptively simple question 'Who am I?'

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and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings.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.

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?"

A documentary focused on former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief and fashion stylist Carine Roitfeld.

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. 

OHO is considered one of the most interesting, complex and important examples of post-war avant-garde art in Central and Eastern Europe. After achieving major success as one of the first from Eastern Europe to exhibit at New York's MoMA, the group disbanded in 1971. OHO was not just an art collective but a unique cultural phenomenon that explored the visible and the immaterial through art, philosophy, sociology, science and coexistence with the earth and nature. Already in the 1960s, the group was raising relevant questions about anthropocentrism, ecology and the economics of the art. This documentary about OHO by Damjan Kozole is rich in never-before-seen archival material and, for the first time, comprehensively presents this inspiring phenomenon of intertwining art and life. - Slovenian Film Database

Zoran Popovic and his friends in Edinburgh and surrounding area, around July and August of 1973.

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 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?

Compilation film consisting of material from various artists who are involved in body art

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.

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.

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?

We look back at more than half a century of mysterious artistic creation while trying to crack a unique artistic code. Why are people moved to tears when Robert “Bob” Wilson puts minimalistic petrol pumps into a production of Shakespeare’s sonnets? Why does merciless repetition change our understanding of something? Together with Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe or Marina Abramović we trace back our own experience of Bob’s art. Is it true what Philipp Glass the collaborator of the milestone piece “Einstein on the Beach” laughingly and with apparent pleasure exclaims “what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything!”?

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.

Follows the artist over two years as he explores his „life after Beethoven“, as he searches for his next challenge, his identity as an artist.

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.

A story of soul searching, science, nature and creativity, InnSæi takes us on a global journey to uncover the art of connecting within today's world of distraction and stress.

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.

A meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain that focuses on the tragic figure of renowned American-Greek opera singer Maria Callas (1923-77), whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century while her life was wracked by scandal and personal suffering.

As one art scene insider proclaims, the contemporary art world can be summed up as “rich people trying to prove how rich they are,” but is that all there is to this billion dollar industry? Well-researched and expertly constructed, Barry Avrich’s eye-opening documentary peels back the layers of the art world economy- from production to circulation, and delineates every integral player in the game of art-making, including curators, gallerists, collectors, donors, auction houses, and … artists. In the process, he unpacks the complex and surprising ecosystem that supports the art world superstars and million-dollar deals that make front-page news. Featuring extraordinary access to industry players and candid statements from prominent artists like Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel, Taryn Simon, and Marina Abramovic, Blurred Lines collides the two narratives of the art world as both above and beholden to market forces.

In this second installment of his exploration of creativity, Hermann Vaske looks for factors that inhibit it. He asks artists, activists, and thinkers about things that kill their creativity.

Filmmaker Hermann Vaske explores the creative Balkan world in the hopes of understanding the meaning of "Balkan spirit".

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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.

Between 1967 and 1977 Italian Art experiences a moment of glory on the international art scene. Art comes out from galleries and museums and becomes expression of social and political change. The film describes a period when Italy was the centre of international avant-garde.

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.

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, Shia LaBeouf and his artist friends launched a live stream art project called 'HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US' that ran for four years, the duration of Trump's presidential term. But what began as a spirited display of resistance against the divisive presidential election result quickly devolved into an internet meme. The live stream attracted attention from the darkest corners of 4CHAN, encouraging trolls who made it their life's mission to ruin Shia's art project.

At a three-day retreat in upstate New York, Marina instructed Lady Gaga in the Abramovic Method--a series of exercises designed to heighten participants' awareness of their physical and mental experience in the present moment.

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.

Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically to the sounds of a bongo player. During the early part of the performance, she still has plenty of energy, and she rocks her hips and upper body vigorously to and fro. Over the course of the six hours, exhaustion sets in. Abramović falls back on a single monotonous movement, now and then visibly exerting herself in an attempt to reivigorate her body. After a final convulsive movement, in which she tries to give her all for one last time, she allows herself to collapse onto the floor and remains lying there, completely exhausted. During the performance, Abramović's head was covered by a black scarf. In this way, the audience was not distracted by Abramović as a person or personality, and attention can be focused on the body, which, due to its anonymity, has become an abstraction.

The tradition of modernism and neo-avant-garde are faced in the project, in which Radziszewski is confronting both – Polish and Western – narratives of art history. Starting from the subversive work of Natalia LL, Radziszewski raises a series of questions on issues such as gender, feminist art, conceptual art, queer and East-West relations and their impact on the art world in the context of the Iron Curtain. America Is Not Ready For This is an open archive in search of parallels between the artistic experiences of Natalia LL and Radziszewski, as well as an attempt to examine the rules of the positioning of artists in the art world, both at that time and today.

Short 8mm experimental footage film.

Mourning the death of her father, Giulia is contacted by him from the other dimension.

“Before the eyes of all, at least of those present, the naked and direct exhibitions of the body take place with all its extensions; but the naked eye of the spectators who circle is promptly doubled by the many mechanical or electronic eyes of the photographic equipment and of the 'cameras' which, with their clicks and their tenacious buzzing, form the background” Renato Barilli

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."

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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.

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.

Documentary shows how the relentless artist applies her method to the audience at a classical concert.

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.

The film 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.

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.

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Four female artists have been politicized by experiences with war, violence and suppression and integrated them into their work, using their most personal tool: their own bodies.

Television special of five episodes directed by Alfredo Di Laura dedicated to the exhibition "Attivo. Performance e Dibattiti" curated by Tommaso Trini.

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!

Unable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.

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

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.

Ulay and Abramović are standing holding a double-sided mirror between their bodies.

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 slide show of the performance "Rhythm 0" by Serbian artist Marina Abramovic in which she stands impassively and put herself completely in the hands of her audience.

For this performance the two artists blocked their nostrils with cigarette filters and pressed their mouths together, so that one couldn’t inhale anything else but the exhalation of the other. As the carbon dioxide filled their lungs, they began to sweat, move vehemently and wear themselves out; the viewers could sense their agony through the projected sound of breathing, which was augmented via microphones attached to their chests. It took them 19 minutes in the first performance and 15 in the second to consume all the oxygen in that one breath and reach the verge of passing out.

The video tape shows the half-length portraits of Abramović and her husband Ulay standing opposite each other, looking at each other and producing a long sound with open mouths.

In The Room, Franco-Egyptian visual artist Youssef Nabil delivers a poetic, meditative short film that plays like a vintage piece of Golden Age Egyptian celluloid. Melding moving image with his signature hand-colored, highly theatrical aesthetic, Nabil crafts a comforting fable about mortality and transition. The film follows Nabil as a soul contemplating the end of his earthly existence. He is met at the threshold by performance art icon Marina Abramović, who embodies a serene, angelic guide. Rather than leading him into darkness, Abramović awakens him from the "dream" of life and ushers him through a symbolic doorway into a radiant, hyper-saturated paradise. Materializing as a traditional Farah (an Arabic wedding celebration meaning "Joy"), this afterlife becomes a festive, music-filled homecoming—framing the end of life not as a tragedy, but as a beautiful transition into eternal celebration.

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.

Ulay is fixed to a wall by a fixed rubber cord, while Marina stands at the limit of Ulay's expansion.

"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

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.

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."

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.

Documentation of the 2-hour performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay, performed in 1978 at Harlekin Art in Wiesbaden. In this piece, the two artists and a live snake triangulate the performance space. By blowing across the mouths of empty bottles, Abramović and Ulay produce sounds meant to rouse the snake, attempting to charm it and alter the physical geometry of the arrangement.

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.

In the first 58 minute Performance, Relation in Space, which took place in July 1976 at the Biennale in Venice, Abramovic/Ulay, both naked, walk towards each other from opposite ends of a room, touching as they pass each other, and then they repeat the movement while their bodies collide and one of them (Marina) falls over under the impact, until they are both exhausted. A statically mounted video camera simultaneously filmed the touching of the bodies in the middle of the room.

Serbian artist Marina Abramovic is lying on her back on the floor and screaming until her voice is lost.

Relation Work is a 1979 anthology film that compiles 14 seminal performance art pieces created by Marina Abramović and Ulay between 1976 and 1978. The compilation features the following 14 chronological performances: Relation in Space (1976) Talking about Similarity (1976) Breathing in, Breathing out (1977) Imponderabilia (1977) Expansion in Space (1977) Relation in Movement (1977) Relation in Time (1977) Light/Dark (1977) Balance Proof (1977) AAA-AAA (1978) Incision (1978) Kaiserschnitt (1978) Charged Space (1978) Three (1978)

'Talking about Similarity' took place in Amsterdam, on November 30th, 1976. The performance, which lasted ca. 45 minutes, contains two parts that are very different in form, but content-wise form a whole. Ulay begins, Abramovic takes over. This makes 'Talking about Similarity' the only performance in their oeuvre in which they are not both performing at the same time.

In 'Expansion in Space' (1977, Dokumenta 6, Kassel), Ulay and Abramovic do not collide with each other, as they did in Relation in Space (1976), but with two free-standing pillars twice their individual body weight. Their goal is to make the pillars move by means of their naked bodies, and in this way to expand the space of action

Marina: we even use our car in the performance, in '77, for the Paris Biennale in the front of the museum we made this piece called Relation In Movement, which Ulay is driving the car and I had the megaphone out of the window, and I would say the numbers of the circle as we was passing, because it was just going in a circle, on and on and on. The idea was the car collapsed or we collapsed. and after 16 hours, the motor burned out and created this minimal trace on the marble as a black circle. For us each circle was a kind of imaginary year.

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.

‘Freeing the Memory’ is the second of three significant performances enacted in 1976 in which Marina Abramović attempted to achieve a mental cleaning through the exhaustion of the three main faculties of expression, voice, language and body. In this piece, Abramović said every individual word she could recall until she could no longer continue without repetition. The mental strain of this act, which lasted ninety minutes, allowed the artist to exhaust her consciousness into a state of complete blankness.

As Abramović's spectral odyssey unfolds, she encounters symbolic entities and pays homage to sacred spaces. Through rituals, encounters, and profound teachings, she achieves the transcendence of her soul from its earthly vessel, finding solace at last. The film culminates with Abramović's contemplative moment in Venice, marking the conclusion of her transformative journey.