INSPIRED BY MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Marina Abramović is a contemporary artist, who expresses her feelings and her thoughts through different performances.
She was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her career, during the early 1970s where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works.
The artist in the beginning of her career has worked alone, but in 1976 she met Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) who became her lover and partner in numerous performances.
Marina is such an inspiring person for me, hence why I decided to recreate a few of her performances, in fashion photographs. I am showing a small process and progress of her life through the chosen performances.
The first one is called Rhythm 10 (1973). The objects she used—a white sheet of paper, twenty knives of different sizes, and two tape recorders—and the details of the performance, which she begins like this:
I turn on the tape recorder.
I take the first knife and stab in between the fingers of my left hand as fast as possible.
Every time I cut myself, I change the knife.
When I’ve used all of the knives (all of the rhythms), I rewind the tape recorder.
I listen to the tape recording of the first part of the performance.
I concentrate…
My second choice was Relation in Time (1977). This one is described as a static relation, the artist couple are sitting back to back, and their hair is firmly tied together, symbolizing the bond between them. For the first 16 hours they sat there without an audience. In the 17th hour, the public were admitted, and Abramović /Ulay continued to sit motionless for another hour. Each hour, a photograph was taken. There are few visible changes – sometimes Ulay sits with his eyes closed, sometimes Marina, or both have them open and look into the void.
On my picture there is no Ulay, just two "Marinas" symbolizing her storng will of self recognition and spiritual development.
Rest Energy (1980) is also an art piece created and performed by the duo in Amsterdam. Four minutes in duration, Abramović has described it as one of two of the most difficult pieces she has ever done, saying:
I was not in charge. In Rest Energy we actually held an arrow on the weight of our bodies, and the arrow is pointed right into my heart. We had two small microphones near our hearts, so we could hear our heartbeats. As our performance was progressing, heartbeats were becoming more and more intense, and though it lasted just four minutes and ten seconds, I’m telling you, for me it was forever. It was a performance about the complete and total trust.
And again, in my creation there are only two Marinas, but here one is aiming the arrow to the other. A past Marina in front of a future Marina, symbolizing that she has to leave the past behind, because the past Marina is holding back the new one. She has to lose her own perceptions, let the old limits and boundaries fade in order to become a better artist and move further her new and stronger form.
And finally, one of Marina's best known performance: The Artist is Present (2010).
The work was inspired by her belief that stretching the length of a performance beyond expectations serves to alter our perception of time and foster a deeper engagement in the experience. Seated silently at a wooden table across from an empty chair, she waited as people took turns sitting in the chair and locking eyes with her. Over the course of nearly three months, for eight hours a day, she met the gaze of 1,000 strangers, many of whom were moved to tears.
"Nobody could imagine…that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me" - Abramović explained. In fact, the chair was always occupied, and there were continuous lines of people waiting to sit in it.
"It was [a] complete surprise…this enormous need of humans to actually have contact."
On my picture Marina is sitting on a chair in an empty room, totally alone, making eye contact with the viewer, just as in the performance.
Photographer / FP Abel
Styling / Dmitrii Gronic
Makeup / Orosz Réka
Model / Betti at Crisp Model Management
