CityLife

Marina's remarkable in front of and away from camera

CRYSTAL VISION: Marina Abramovic

NOTHING I’d heard about Marina Abramovic’s extraordinary, provocative and often downright dangerous performance-art creations - stabbing herself, allowing a passer-by to hold a loaded gun to her head, inducing seizures, whipping herself into near-insensibility and, occasionally, having to be saved from near-certain death only by the intervention of concerned audience members – could have prepared me for the calm, funny, reflective, extraordinarily young-looking woman (she’s 63) I’m talking to about the new MIF show she’s curating.

Although she does make me just a little nervous with a pointed reminder that I’m making her miss her breakfast!

Called Marina Abramovic Presents..., it’s a remarkable show, perhaps the closest equivalent at this year’s festival to the iconoclastic Il Tempo del Postino in the 2007 MIF.

It boasts some of the most innovative live artists working today - some of whom, not coincidentally, have studied with the woman often known as “the godmother of performance art” – with featured artists including Ivan Civic, Nikhil Chopra, Amanda Coogan, Marie Cool, Fabio Balducci, Yingmei Duan, Eun Hye Hwang, Jamie Isenstein, Terence Koh, Alistair MacLennan, Kira O’Reilly, Melati Suryodarmo, Nico Vascellari and Jordan Wolfson.

For this groundbreaking event, the Whitworth has emptied every gallery space, a unique occurrence.

“There was a long silence when I first suggested that,” Marina laughs.

Better organisation

“But they had a staff meeting about it, which didn’t take very long, and agreed. The relationship with the gallery has been more than excellent, I have never worked with a better organisation,” she enthuses.

Beforehand, Marina recalls meeting with festival director Alex Poots “a few times in New York and being more and more convinced each time that this was a festival that was right for me to be involved in.

"What was interesting to me was that Alex wanted to do only new things, work that was original and risky. My work is all about taking risks, so it seemed like a perfect match, which, believe me, doesn’t happen too often.

“Once we’d reached an agreement in principle, he just said ‘you do it’ and left me alone.”

Deciding on the other artists who would take part in the show was, apparently, just as straightforward.

“Maria Balshaw at the Whitworth, Hans Ulrich Obrist and I just put some names on the table of people whose work we thought would be interesting in this context, agreed on all of them and, again, let them create their work.”

She was also surprised, she admits, by just how open people seemed to be to the concept of taking four hours to experience the art – and signing a contract to that effect.

“We impose so many restrictions on them,” she admits. “We strip them of all gadgets, watches, mobile phones and put them in white lab-coats.

"At the outset, I spend an hour in which I try to slow them down in every possible way, to make them as receptive as possible to these fourteen performances. Yet the tickets went very quickly, so it looks like it’s the right time for an experiment like this.”

Marina Abramovic Presents… is at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, until Sunday, July 19.