Movies: Ulay

Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York....

Ulay is fixed to a wall by a fixed rubber cord, while Marina stands at the limit of Ulay's expansion....

Ulay and Abramovic draw a large bow and arrow, one holding each side. The arrowhead is pointing at Abramovic's heart. The slightest movement could be fatal. Microphones on their clothes pick up their quickening heart beats and Ulay's irregular breath...

Thirty years after their separation, performance artists Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe 'Ulay' Laysiepen (1943-2020) agree to meet, for the first time on camera, for a raw and honest conversation about their life, art and legacy....

Ulay is a conceptual artist whose photography pushed boundaries, and whose love affair with Marina Abramovic produced some of the best pieces of performance art. Diagnosed with cancer shortly after agreeing to film the documentary, Ulay's illness inf...

China Ring is an "unedited video notebook" that documents the artists' journey to the Great Wall of China in preparation for their final collaborative project....

Legendary couple in performance art – Marina Abramović and Ulay – lived together for 12 years and made pioneering work as a duo. In this extraordinary double interview the artists looks back on their relationship – from their first meeting in 1975 un...

Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rather than a mechanical reproduction of the artist's work, the film tries to create a new reality by translating the performances into cinematog...

"Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose which one of us to face" – Marina Abramovich...

Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically to the sounds of a bongo player. During the early part of the performance, she still has plenty of energy, and she r...

El camino entre dos puntos (The way between two points) investigates Patagonia’s tainted nature. Here, where throughout the 20th century ever enhanced methods of oil recovery, have transformed an amorphous, ambivalent and hardly populated landscape i...

In 'Expansion in Space' (1977, Dokumenta 6, Kassel), Ulay and Abramovic do not collide with each other, as they did in Relation in Space (1976), but with two free-standing pillars twice their individual body weight. Their goal is to make the pillars ...

The starting point of Kaiserschnitt is a triangular construction. A horse stands in the centre of a large space, tied to a rope. Ulay and Abramovic are connected to the horse by means of the rope, which runs through two rings fastened to opposite wal...

When the speed and the spinning becomes too much for them, they let go and collapse.....

In the twilight years of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese filmmaker slowly becoming blind tours the country screening her last film to peasants. In it, the woman imagines two "alien" lovers walking from end-to-end along the Great Wall to join each ...

‘Freeing the Memory’ is the second of three significant performances enacted in 1976 in which Marina Abramović attempted to achieve a mental cleaning through the exhaustion of the three main faculties of expression, voice, language and body. In this ...

Marina: we even use our car in the performance, in '77, for the Paris Biennale in the front of the museum we made this piece called Relation In Movement, which Ulay is driving the car and I had the megaphone out of the window, and I would say the num...

Marina Abramovic's performance 'Relation in time', with her long time partner Ulay. "We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair, without any movement for 16 hours. Then the audience came in. We continued sitting for one hour."...

'Talking about Similarity' took place in Amsterdam, on November 30th, 1976. The performance, which lasted ca. 45 minutes, contains two parts that are very different in form, but content-wise form a whole. Ulay begins, Abramovic takes over. This makes...

Serbian artist Marina Abramovic is lying on her back on the floor and screaming until her voice is lost....