Meeting with Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance artist, writer, art film director, and producer. Her work explores body art, endurance art and feminist art, the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Abramović refers to herself as the “grandmother of performance art”. She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on “confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body”.

Th exhibition”The cleaner” is devoted to the work of Marina Abramović.  It will be the unveiling of Europe’s most massive retrospective by the artist, realized jointly with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in cooperation with the Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art in Humlebæk and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn.

The exhibition started in Toruń on 8^thof March and will finish there onthe 11^thof August. Poland is the only country in this part of Europe that participates in the tour. The exhibition presented in Toruń consist of approximately 120 works, starting with works from the 1960s, on contemporary realizations. The organizers will also reconstruct some of Abramović’s performative actions, which will be presented live during the show, next to drawings,   paintings, sculptures, objects, photographs, video films, and archival elements.

During preparation for the upcoming events, Abramović enjoyed the architecture of CKK Jordanki, one of Menis Arquitectos’ projects. The presence of brickin the walls of the building establishes a harmonious relationship with the natural and built environment. Fernando Menis used his innovative technique called Picado in the entire building. The mix of concrete and (in this particular case) bricks from a local factory and reddish volcanic stone fromChina besides rough expression, allows excellent acoustic results. The red brick is used in almost thewhole building, andit references to the town’s cultural heritage. The project of CKK Jordanki has been awarded many times in Poland as well as internationally. Impressed by the beautiful design, Marina Abramović decided to invite the author of the building for theopening of the exhibition. This is how Fernando Menis got theunique opportunity to meet an outstanding artist.

Marina Abramović has been working for about five decades. She is an icon of performance and an extraordinary figure in the world of contemporary art. Fernando Menis got the honor of meeting the artist twice. First, the private meeting with sponsors, artists,and curators which took part on 7^thof March in Toruń. The second opportunity to meet with the artist was on Saturday 9^thof March, in CKK Jordanki, when Marina Abramović had the interview with the curators.