So I spent most of the day at Marina Abramović presents which was part of the Manchester’s International Festival. And I can say it was an impressive day. I won’t go into much detail just incase Marina does decided to run the event again using the same artist.
So they were right, its challenging. for example at one point I was attempting to clean someones teeth with a toothbrush and at another point a naked lady shuffled up to me and stared me in the face from about half a meter away. Marina introduces the whole experience in a room full of people for the first hour. She runs a series of exercises to calm your breathing and get you use to understanding long duration art. One of those exercises is drinking a small cup of water but over a period of 10mins.
There’s also a period of staring a strangers face for up to 5mins.
After spending a hour with Marina your ready to make your own way through the rest of the experiences.
There were about 12 different artists performing through the day, some of my favourite included Nico Vascellari‘s songs which involved banging tin and rocks together in a basement with a additional sound track coming from the 2nd floor. Eunhye Hwang did some very interesting things with radios and the public. If you wait long enough, you will see Jelly and Radio, I’ll say no more. Nikhil Chopra spent hours drawing over the walls and floor using charcoal, according to others over time he sketched many pictures, which here would later scribled over it.
Really wrorth going and I’m glad I went along