The late German artist, filmmaker, and theater director Christoph Schlingensief developed a mobile revolving stage installation entitled "Animatograph" for the 2005 Reykjavik Arts Festival. This contribution to the Icelandic festival, which was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, had been presented for the first time with a performance by Christoph Schlingensief at the Klink og Bank Gallery in Reykjavik in 2005 and will now be shown at BAK Utrecht.> >

The film, from first-time director Matthew Akers, offers an exclusive behind-the-scenes portrait of Marina Abramović, one of most compelling and challenging artists of our time, following the artist in the momentous year leading up to her major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. The narrative spine of the documentary MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, co-produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, is the mounting of the eponymous retrospective and its three-month exhibition at MoMA. The show’s centrepiece consisted of a new and radically simple performance: for the entire three months from March to May and without interruption during the opening hours of the museum, Marina Abramović would be present to perform a new piece. Members of the audience were invited to join the artist, one at a time, at the opposite end of a table. Without talking, touching, any overt communication or movement, visitor and artist engaged in an “energy dialogue”, characterised by its stunning ascetic simplicity and at the same time putting the performer under an unimaginable physical and psychological strain.

The documentary combines footage of this silent, monumental performance with extensive and intimate interviews with the artist and insights into Marina Abramović’s life in New York, as well as interweaving archival film material from the past 30 years. The artist’s friends and colleagues, including Klaus Biesenbach, curator of the MoMA, art critic Arthur Danto and Marina Abramović’s early partner and long-time creative collaborator Ulay speak about her, her work and significance for the establishment of performance as a legitimate and radical form of art. > >

With The Murder of Crows, their largest sound installation to date, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller continued the explorations they embarked on in the mid-1990s into the sculptural and physical attributes of sound. In the premises of Kiasma 98 loudspeakers are installed. These emit the sounds of voices, music and soundscapes generated by special stereophonic recording and replay techniques, creating a composition that has a direct physical impact on the listener. The installation is conceived like a film or a play, but one whose images and narrative structures are created by sound alone. The three-part work, composed in collaboration with Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, is 30 minutes long.> >