The Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, "MAC Lyon", is organizing an exhibition where recordings and archival photos of the performances of two famous artists - Marina Abramović and Ulaj, will be shown in the period between 1976 and 1988.
The two met in Amsterdam in 1976 and soon after they began to collaborate, creating performances that exceeded all previous boundaries. In 1986, Abramović and Ulaj presented their work at MAC Lyon. In 1995, when the couple separated, they decided to enjoy their artistic partnership by compiling an archive, which was acquired by a French museum.
The archive will be shown on September 15, as part of the program "Marina Abramović and Ulaj - Collection: Performances from 1976 to 1988", and will be available to the public until January 2.
Among the outstanding works is the performance by Abramović and Ulaj from 1977. It was a performance called "Imponderabilia" for which a couple stood naked on either side of the door, inviting the audience to choose which one they wanted to face as they entered the exhibition. In the performance "Breathing in/Breathing out", also from 1977, this duo of artists were "trapped" in a long kiss, breathing each other's exhaled air, to the point of potential suffocation.
"Nightsea Crossing," on the other hand, might strike an audience as an early precursor to "The Artist is Present" performance, which featured two artists sitting across from each other, quietly, each on their own side of the table. This performance was performed 22 times between 1981 and 1986, and was shown all over the world, from Sydney to Chicago.
Their work from 1988 - "The Lovers: The Great Wall walk" will also be highlighted at the exhibition. For this performance, Abramović and Ulaj went to meet each other from different sides of the Great Wall of China in order to meet halfway... and say goodbye to each other, parting ways, thus sealing their separation as partners.
Words from the museum in Lyon
In 1986, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon hosted an exhibition of the pioneers of performance art, Marina Abramović and Frank Uve Lajsipen, better known as Ulaj. Abramović was born in Yugoslavia, and Ulaj in Germany. It was an opportunity for these two artists to present and bring to an end the performance cycle that brought them international recognition - "Nightsea Crossing".
The work took its final form with a performance in Lyon, and the museum acquired photographs and recordings that preserve the memory of the sometimes extreme moments they record. A few years later, in 1988, when the couple separated and the artistic partnership ended, they decided to go back to the recordings of various joint performances and condense the material into an archive of essential moments. In 1999, MAC Lyon and the Van Abe Museum in Eindhoven co-produced this project and acquired all the resulting "video-performances". MAC Lyon thus owns all recordings of the artists' joint works. A selection from that oeuvre is the subject of this exhibition.
In addition to "Nightsea Crossing", 1981-1986, "The Lovers: The Great Wall walk", 1988 - the piece that sealed their separation - some of the most important performances from the beginning of their collaboration will be exhibited.
The works of Marina Abramović and Ulaj relied on the individual perspectives and concerns shared by these two artists; they tested the physical limits of their bodies, the limits of their relationships and mental abilities, as well as the social or cultural codes that influenced them to conform to stereotypes about gender, sex, and normalcy in general.
"Imponderabilia" from 1977 obliged visitors to the exhibition where the performance was performed to choose whom they would face "face to face" upon entering: Ulay or Marina - a man or a woman - both stood naked on different sides of the door, and a visitor was supposed to pass between them.
In addition to "Breathing in/Breathing out" from 1977, when they were "locked" in a continuous kiss breathing each other's exhaled breath and reached the point of potential suffocation, in the performance "Talking about Similarity" from 1976 they asked the question whether it is possible to speak on behalf of another... - Ulaj sewed his lips together, letting Marina speak for him.
When it comes to their last joint performance, at the same time the end of their relationship, "The Lovers: The Great Wall walk", it is interesting that it took them eight years to get approval from the Chinese authorities to go "for a walk"... And it was a way to test the potential of their relationship that they both knew was over. They started walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet at its center, but when they met, they realized they could no longer communicate and parted forever.
The work of the two artists, which is widely represented in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, touches on fundamental issues that would today be described as anthropological: the couple, gender issues, body and corporeal awareness, challenges to the body, mental pain management and endurance, exposure to danger, connection with the environment and other cultures, and even social and political criticism...
In "Nightsea Crossing", an idea they came up with during a trip to Earth Rock (Australia), aborigines and a Tibetan lama were invited to the "sitting". In Japan, they actually dug a space for their "sitting" in the country.
Within a couple of years, Marina Abramović and Frank Uve Lajsipen created a powerful body of work that left a lasting impression on viewers lucky enough to attend one of their live performances.
About artists
Marina Abramović, born in 1946 in Belgrade, was a child of war. In her early performances, she often put her life in danger, as in 5's "Rhythm 1974," a piece in which she stretched herself between star-shaped points that were set on fire and eventually passed out from lack of oxygen.
Ulaj, abbreviated to Frank Uve Leisippen, was born in 1943 in Solingen and died in 2020 in Ljubljana. He was trained as a photographer. At first, he worked with Polaroid cameras and made self-portraits in which he explored gender differences using stage makeup. He stole a painting in 1976 from the National New Gallery in Berlin, the one thought to be Adolf Hitler's favorite - "The Poor Poet" by Karl Spitzweg, and left it to a Turkish family in the suburbs.
Marina Abramović recorded it on film.
Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe Lajsippen met in a Dutch television studio in 1975 and worked together from 1976 to 1988, when they parted ways. During those 12 years, this duo of artists created performances in which many aspects of human existence were put to the test.
Whether it is physical strength, resistance to pain or emotional or psychological state, Marina and Ulaj tested the boundaries of female and male identity, which they transformed into a more universal form of dualism: light/dark, male/female, positive/negative, silence/ noise, active/passive, rest/movement, rest/energy.
"Relation Works" were performances performed without preparation or rehearsal, so their outcome was unpredictable. Nevertheless, they were recorded in order to "retrospectively see what processes we managed to achieve", said Marina Abramović.
Those films were originally conceived only as records that the artists did not even plan to publish, but they decided to turn them into an "a posteriori" work in the form of an installation, co-produced by a museum in Eindhoven and Lyon.
Translated and edited by: Anđela Flis
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