Dir: Matthew Akers co-director Jeff Dupre
USA/2012/106mins
Print Souce: Madman Entertainment
Panorama Audience Award: Berlin
Official Selection: Sundance
One of the world’s most acclaimed performance artists the Serbian born, New York based, Marina Abramovic has been creating groundbreaking works for four decades. Now, at the age of 63, she is embarking on a major retrospective at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, simultaneously using the opportunity the exhibition provides to unveil what may be her most powerful and evocative work to date.
Exploring Abramovic’s creative processes, her career and her personal life (itself entwined, almost invariably, with her work), Matthew Akers’ documentary offers an unique portrait of the artist and a rare opportunity to witness the processes that inform her creative practice. The final scenes, in which the film documents her three month long performance, offer a fascinating insight, not just into the artist’s work but into the way in which audiences engage with it and the effect it has on both the artist and those who experience the work.
Acclaimed by many critics for making performance art accessible to the uninitiated while also containing enough to satisfy the legions of Abramovic fans from the art world, Aker’s film makes for powerful, compulsive viewing, and it is unsurprising it won the audience award at Berlin.
Screens with The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma