What role can art play in a world that, as a result of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, should be focusing on all today’s wars and conflicts? This is the question I put to Marina Abramović, whose work I value for the way she pushes boundaries, exposes pain, accepts physical extremes and touches raw nerves.
Whenever our lives struggle, her art acts as a support, offering an attitude and positioning. She doesn’t let you off the hook, doesn’t offer ways of escape. Her mantra is to walk through walls. There is no privacy. In war – in the suffering and death that it brings – there is no privacy, no withdrawal from what is happening, no looking away. In societies unaffected by conflict, however, we are able to turn off social media, mute the sound and put our mobile phones aside. That’s cynical: nothing about the truth, about what is happening, can be suppressed or turned off. In some places, trauma is simply a reality. In each and every individual, it unleashes a wave of pain and anguish that is passed down through the generations. The pain, the memory and the trauma returns with every war. This is also the case for Abramović, who grew up the daughter of Tito-supporters in Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, her parents were active in the anti-fascist Yugoslav Partisans that successfully fought the Nazi-led Axis powers.
“My parents were Partisan heroes,” the artist explains. “I lived in a kind of gilded cage where I had lots of things, but I wasn’t loved and I was completely controlled by my mother. I was very shy. I withdrew, I wrote poetry and painted pictures. I suffered from the very vivid impressions that my parents gave me of what happened during the war because they drew on their personal experiences. My childhood and adolescence played-out against a backdrop in which the experience of war remained an abiding constant within our family.” While this instilled in her a profound sense of revulsion against armed conflicts, it also sparked her desire to engage in such themes through art. “You cannot change the world through art,” she continues, “consciousness must be changed. Humans have not altered over the centuries. We kill, rape and oppress. War, hunger, displacement are everywhere. There are so many wars, too many. I feel very close to Ukraine.”
In October last year, Marina Abramović unveiled her Crystal Wall of Crying, an extensive installation at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. It occupies part of the site where the Nazis massacred 33,771 Jewish people in the space of three days.
“The Crystal Wall of Crying is a 40-metre-long wall made of black Ukrainian coal studded with giant Brazilian quartz crystals,” Abramović says. “I call them healing crystals. The inauguration was an extremely emotional moment. The present is a cruel blow into the heart of all our consciousness. The wall is still standing. I wonder what the task for us as artists is at the moment – for us as human beings in general.” In light of the brutal, daily escalation of the war in Ukraine, as well as the numerous civilian victims and the millions of people who are displaced and fleeing the country, it is important for Abramović to take a stance.
“During these awful days I feel complete solidarity with everyone there,” she continues. “The attack on Ukraine is an attack on all of us. My generation was born after the Second World War and I didn’t expect such a situation. Now it’s really dangerous because we have upset Putin’s ego, he cannot lose, he’ll destroy every single stone in Ukraine before he pulls out. I’m familiar with the restrictions imposed by a communist country and know that you have to pay if you overstep them. That’s why the situation is much more dangerous than we think, for everyone, for the whole planet.”
As she formulates these words, her eyes are fixed on her interlocutor. I remember the phrase used by a Ukrainian woman who was talking to camera for a German TV station, she was saying that “hope is born out of anger and desperation”. “My art is a space of processing and renewal. I have to be an artist through and through, and I’m certainly not here to live a life that has no meaning. The higher the hurdle, the greater the sacrifice. If someone says no to me, that just gets me going. So there are no artistic ‘quick fixes’ now. I’m not doing this for myself. The moment I have a new idea, I’m looking for a way to communicate it. All I’m doing right now is talking about it. I’m talking about the war and my emotional reaction to it. My wish is that The Crystal Wall of Crying will one day bring healing again. Now is the time to offer active help, and – very clearly – everyone who supports Putin must be boycotted. Brutality and violence do not go hand in hand with humanity.”
Babyn Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv where. Between 29th and 30th September 1941, German Nazi and collaborating Ukrainian forces inflicted what was at the time the largest single massacre of Jews in the Second World War.
This following is the testimony of Dina Pronicheva (1911–1971), later a Soviet actor and one of the massacre’s few survivors:
“They had to lie on their stomachs on the bodies of the murdered and wait for the shots that came from above. Then the next group came. For 36 hours, Jews came and died. Maybe people were the same in dying and death, but everyone was different until the last moment, everyone had different thoughts and premonitions until everything was clear, and then everything went black. Some people died thinking of others, like the mother of the beautiful fifteen-year-old Sara, who asked to be shot along with her daughter. Here was a worry even at the end: if she saw her daughter being shot, she would not see her being raped. A naked mother spent her last moments giving her breast to her infant. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped in after it.”
As featured in SLEEK 73 – PASSION. Available in print and digital here.