En 2010, plus de 750 000 personnes se sont pressées au Museum of Modern Art de New York pour avoir la chance d'assister à la performance célébrant les cinquante années de carrière de Marina Abramovic.
Traverser les murs, récit saisissant, épique et d'un humour impitoyable, raconte comment une jeune femme élevée par une mère folcoche, qui a grandi dans la Yougoslavie communiste de Tito, est devenue, en quelques décennies, une icône mondiale de l'art contemporain.
En repoussant les limites du corps humain, la peur, la douleur, la fatigue, dans une quête sans compromis de transformation émotionnelle et spirituelle, Marina Abramovic, qui compte parmi ses admirateurs Lady Gaga et Jay-Z, a révolutionné l'art de la performance, devenant l'une des plus importantes inspiratrices de l'esthétique de la pop culture au XXIème siècle.
Née en ex-Yougoslavie en 1946, Marina Abramovic est une figure majeure de l'art contemporain. Créatrice de performances artistiques mondialement célèbres, elle a exploré le body art jusqu'à en repousser les définitions. Elle vit entre New York et l'Hudson Valley, où elle a créé le Marina Abramovic Institute.
I had experienced absolute freedom--I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didnt matter, that nothing mattered at all--and it intoxicated me. In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramovis MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramovi is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Titos regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mothers abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor--all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story--a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe--a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China. Marinas story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.
