Dá-me a tua mão...

"Marina Abramovic met F. Uwe Laysiepen, aka Ulay, in December 1975. It was love at first sight. Before meeting, the individual artistic desires of Marina and Ulay were particularly focused on the question of the status of man and woman. Oscillating between desire and the rejection of a primordial unity and fusion, the work of Abramovic and Ulay was to be part of a process of transcendence and referring back to oneself as an individual in the collective.

In twelve years of living and working together, Marina Abramovic and Ulay have explored all the parameters that drive the dynamics of a relationship, and this through the prism of the body. In a perfect balance between the symbolic and the cathartic, each of their performances takes a look at, and redefines, the concept of the alter ego. The timeless character of Relation Works by Marina Abramovic and Ulay is the contemporary manifesto of the "couple makes art".

Finally, on March 30th 1988, Marina and Ulay began to walk the Great Wall of China from opposite ends, a walk that brought them together in the middle on June 27th, after having travelled almost 2000 km over ninety days. As Bernard Narcadé says, "this action (The Lovers - The Great Wall Walk), decided upon together, was to be the last. [...] As soon as they were reunited, they were able to finally say, face-to-face, that if the performance was over, their life together was also over, and that from that moment on, their paths had to separate". It’s nearly thirty years ago now that Marina Abramovic and Ulay enacted their first performance. Even now, the dynamics specific to the couple remain entangled in a series of issues that they theorized by the gesture better than anyone else..."

 23 anos depois da separação, numa retrospectiva da sua obra organizada pelo MoMa, Marina ofereceu aos visitantes uma performance onde partilhava com um estranho um minuto de silêncio.  Ulay apareceu e este é o retrato de um amor que se reecontra ...