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For nearly three months, eight hours a day, Marina Abramović met the gaze of more than 1,500 strangers as part of ‘The Artist is Present.’ — Picture courtesy of Artsy via ETX Studio
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BELGRADE, March 22 — Like many artists around the world, Marina Abramović is showing her support for Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion. Now, the Serbian artist is taking this a step further by re-staging one of her most famous performances, “The Artist is Present.” Some art lovers will be able to take part by bidding online until March 25.
Two wooden chairs separated by a table is all that Marina Abramović needed to stage “The Artist is Present” at MoMA in New York in 2010. These two seats were set up facing each other, with one for the Serbian artist, the other for participants. The latter came in succession to stare into the eyes of the goddess of performance art for several long minutes, in silence.
For nearly three months, eight hours a day, Marina Abramović met the gaze of more than 1,500 strangers—a level of success that she did not expect. “Nobody could imagine ... that anybody would take the time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me,” she said following the performance.
Marina Abramović will now stage the performance again on April 16 at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, which is currently holding an entire exhibition dedicated to her. Art lovers can bid in an auction to win the opportunity to be photographed by Marco Anelli during this performance. He previously shot portraits of all the people who participated in the first performance of “The Artist is Present” at MoMA. These pictures were then collated in a single book entitled “Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović,” and published in 2012 by Damiani.
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The highest bidders will win the photograph of their meeting with Marina Abramović, framed and signed by the artist and Anelli, as well as a copy of the reprint of “Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović.” However, hopefuls will have to dig deep for a chance to win. The two lots up for auction on the Artsy platform had reached US$12,000 and US$16,000 (RM67,432), at the time of writing. All proceeds from the sale will go to Direct Relief, an organization that provides medical aid to people affected by the war in Ukraine.
Marina Abramović is one of the many cultural figures to have publicly expressed their opposition to the war on Ukraine, unleashed by Vladimir Putin at dawn on Thursday, February 24. “Attack to Ukraina is attack to all of us, is attack to humanity, and has to be stopped,” she said in a video recently posted on the Instagram page of the Marina Abramović Institute. — ETX Studio