A film by Matthew Akers (2011)

Presented in association with International House Philadelphia

Tickets must be purchased through International House Philadelphia in person or online at ihousephilly.org.

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“Vulnerability is important. It means we are completely alive and this is an extremely important space. This is for me the space from which my work generates.” Marina Abramović, performance artist

“An intelligent overview that makes a radical artist's work comprehensible to audiences with no previous awareness of her or her chosen path. Abramović fans, among the art world's most rabid, will salivate at the chance to see their star up close, while skeptics of performance-art modes may have to reconsider their stance after watching this.” Variety

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Marina Abramović has been a groundbreaking and controversial force in performance art for forty years. In 2010 a major retrospective of her work at New York’s MoMA featured her most recent performance, The Artist Is Present, in which audience members took turns sitting silently across a table from Abramović and making eye contact for as long as they like. Marina performed for over seven hundred hours, sitting motionless for seven and a half hours a day, moving her always-changing audience variously to introspection, emotional outburst, and tears.

This mesmerizing documentary film begins in the final throes of planning for the retrospective, providing an intimate insight into Abramović, and follows through the run of her extraordinary performance.