At the weekend I read an article about the performing artist Marina Abramovic in die Zeit Magazin (part of Die Zeit newspaper). I havent seen Marina Abramović:The Artist is Present film which is currently being shown in cinemas or seen any of her perfomances live, nevertheless I found the article really interesting. Can you believe she is 66!   She is one determined woman and pushes herself to the extremes.

Calling herself the grandmother of 'performance art', she was born in Belgrad, 1946. She began using her own body as the subject and medium of her work in the early 1970s. For the exhibition Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, The Museum of Modern Art’s  (MoMA in New York) first performance retrospective, Abramović performed every day between March 14 and May 31, 2010. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork.
(The film is based on this exhibition).

I find her work interesting because she works with the subject of pain and shame. (Many people critisize her for being too fixated with this and think her performances are down right depressing). She herself suffered greatly as a child.  She is interested how people hide from pain/ shame and how they process the feelings.  Whilst looking into the eyes of so many people she acted as a kind of mirror. She says when she looks people in the eyes she doesnt laugh. 'I havent managed to bring humour into my work yet' she says 'There is just too much pain everywhere'.

These were a few reactions from visitors at the MoMA in New York:
'I learnt so much about human psychology: how people came to see Marina but instead saw themselves in her reflection. Many visitors had not met the eyes of a loved one for a long time and when Marina looked right at them and smiled they fell apart'.
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'This experiment/performance piece is very moving. I realize that it’s a very simple concept – I’ll sit here and you sit across from me – but in the silence and the setting it was in, it’s amazing what effects it had on people. It made the viewer part of the artwork, in a very naked way. I’m wondering if some of the emotional reaction had to do with the city it was presented in. I just moved away from New York, and while I was there I felt like I witnessed an excessive amount of bottled up emotions, suppressed hardships and frustrations, a pain that nobody wanted to admit'.