Art Info

AAA - AAA,
Marina Abramovic, 1978

Materials: Single screen video 9:54 mins

Dimensions: Variable

Ed. 3/5+2AP

Abramovic's piece 'AAA - AAA' revolves around the relationship between two lovers. In it we see Abramovic and her partner of 12 years, Ulay, facing each other, gazing into each other's eyes. They both begin to scream into each other's faces, in what is at once an attempt to mirror the other's screams and an attempt to outdo them. As their screams become louder and more emphatic, their straining faces come closer together until they are screaming into each other's open mouths. Yet this is no straight-forward conflict, as it first seemed, for their screams are as much attempting to withstand and reciprocate as their are to obliterate the other. The piece explores the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging, and perhaps inevitably destroying it. Ulay is the first to give up. When Abramovic has also screamed herself hoarse, they both resume their original position. Perhaps a fusion between the two is achieved somewhere in the midst of the performance, but at its end the relationship becomes unstable and collapses. At once emphatically hopeful, determined in its attempts to relate, 'AAA - AAA', quite literally faces up to the struggle to form a bond, and strains the capacity to endure to its limits.

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