Where is Marina Abramovic?

Marina Abramovic sometimes describes herself as “the grandmother of performance art”. Over the Serbian artist’s forty-year career, she has attracted attention with disconcerting performances that have pain and endurance at their heart. When not carving pentagrams on her stomach or inviting spectators to have a go at her body with a series of objects she puts on display, such as a feather, a whip, or a revolver, you might find her – as recently, in a remarkable twist in her career – freestyling with Jay-Z. The general public, for the most part, got to know her through her much-talked-about performance The Artist Is Present, presented on the occasion of the MoMA’s retrospective devoted to her in 2010. That was the longest performance of her career. Abramovic spent three months – that’s 716 hours, six days a week – sitting silently on a chair in the museum opposite every visitor willing to meet her stare.

Which often led to emotional scenes. Not least when Ulay – who lived and worked with her for twelve years – suddenly sat down in front of her after years of absence. The director Matthew Akers followed Abramovic in the preparations for and in the course of that singular performance. You can see the result in the prize-winning documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, which will be screened at Bozar on Wednesday 30 October.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT 30/10, 20.00, €4/6, Bozar, rue Ravensteinstraat 23, 
Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-507.82.00, www.bozar.be