ART VITAL – 12 Years of Ulay / Marina Abramović

The accompanying catalogue of the exhibition ART VITAL – 12 Years of Ulay/Marina Abramović offers comprehensive documentation and a wide range of reflections that illuminate the artists’ radical approach, their shared life, and their political and aesthetic thinking.

In the first set of essays Alenka Gregorič examines how personal documents and audience participation inform an understanding of their work, while Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein reflects on shared authorship, the emergence of a “third energy,” and the ethics of the in-between. Elisabeth von Samsonow discusses the duo’s nomadic, spiritually grounded mode of presence, and Amelia Jones highlights Ulay’s ethical view of art as a lived practice deeply connected to marginalised communities. Bojana Kunst frames their everyday life and vulnerability as the very conditions of their artistic production, and Suzana Milevska reads Imponderabilia (1977) as a radical rethinking of institutional and social boundaries. Diedrich Diederichsen focuses on the specific dynamics of artistic partnerships, showing how collaboration itself becomes an evolving artwork.

A second set of essays further expands this perspective: Sabine Priglinger identifies The Brink (1979) as a turning point toward durational work; Michael Klein offers a personal view shaped by long-standing proximity to the artists; Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas reflects on the meditative and visually charged Polaroid works of the 1980s; Matthieu Lelièvre examines the challenges of preserving performance’s ephemeral legacy; and Kurt Kladler revisits The Lovers (1988) through Ulay’s diary entries. The section concludes with another essay by Thun-Hohenstein, who approaches the archive as a performative field where photographs, objects, and notations continually generate new interpretations.

The essays are accompanied by a wide range of archival material, documents, drawings, contact sheets, and performance photographs.