Marina Abramovic's in Laboral (Gijon, Spanje)
Van 29-05-2009 t/m 30-06-2009
Marina Abramoviç’s latest work 8 Lessons on Emptiness with a Happy End communicates profound anxiety about excess in the contemporary representations of violence. Abramoviç floods us with shocking images of people in pain in a complex video installation which should be understood as a counterpoint to the countless atrocities represented everywhere. It is a recreation of war represented by children.
The work arose from Marina Abramoviç’s experience in Laos, when seeing all the children playing with toy guns. From this she created a complex multichannel video work. Abramoviç establishes stillness in the landscape with “static shots” of a waterfall, an island, and a Spirit Tree; and then she introduces a stylized conflict: negotiations, battle, carrying the captive, carrying the wounded, execution, and so on.
Together with the installation, Abramoviç made a series of photographs entitled Family, where she posed with local children who held plastic toys. Thirteen large format photographs that all represent stages of war in a crucially different way from the usual documentary photography.
Marina Abramoviç is the artist whose credo is that in art one should challenge his/her own limitations, and she lives her art to the very limits of herown endurance.
