Hello, welcome and dobrodošli to Feel Slovenia the podcast. In each episode, we will explore what I have called the world's best country: meeting locals, traveling, eating, and getting to know the very best of Slovenia. This podcast is written and hosted by me, Dr. Noah Charny, and is brought to you by the Slovenian Tourist Board. Ljubljana has quietly become a vibrant center for contemporary art. Its latest highlight is an exhibit at the newly opened Sukrarna, a former sugar factory turned Sleek Gallery. The exhibit is called Art Vital, and it showcases the art of Marina Abramovich and Ulai. The two were pioneers of performance art, both independently and as a pair, both romantically and creatively. When I studied art history as an undergraduate, they were the only two performance artists who were included in my Art History 101 survey course. That's how important they are. This episode is quite personal and special for me, as I knew them both. Ulai lived in Ljubljana until his death in 2020, and we were friends. We had discussed writing a book together, but in the end I wound up writing a book about him, including extensive interviews he and I made in his Ljubljana apartment, and also interviewing Marina Abramovich. Marina is arguably the world's most famous living artist, and this episode features an interview with her. So join me to learn about Ulay and Marina and the exhibit that is the most recent example of Ljubljana as a great contemporary art center. Slovenia's art landscape has become an exciting hub for contemporary creativity, anchored in the vibrant capital Ljubljana. At its heart is the Sukrarna Gallery, a major space for contemporary art that hosts international exhibitions, performance projects, sound work, and experimental visual art in a beautifully restored industrial building on the Ljubljanica River. Sukrarna joins a constellation of dynamic venues in the city, including the Schkutz Gallery, known for its long history of supporting forward-thinking artists and socially engaged work, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Matelkova, which presents cutting-edge national and international collections. Beyond the capital, Slovenia is expanding its cultural footprint with the forthcoming Muse Lach in Bled, a new contemporary art museum designed by David Chipperfield architects and set to open in 2027, which will house an ambitious collection of modern and contemporary art and serve as a cultural destination against the backdrop of the Julian Alps. In this very special episode, I speak to Marina Abramovich, easily the most famous female contemporary artist alive, and probably the most famous living artist regardless of gender. What follows are excerpts from my interview with Marina in Ljubljana in 2024 for my book, There's a Criminal Touch to Art. First, I asked her how she and Ulai met.

Well, I met you in the Apple Gallery when I just arrived, you know, from Margaret, and he was there. I was preparing myself to do the performance Lips of Thomas in the in the gallery for this the the show, the TV show for the first time that was made about body art. It was called body art those days. And he arrived to the gallery and he had this long coat with the fur and half-face makeup as a woman and half-face as a man. And he was looking fantastic. I mean, come on. Coming from fucking communism, I never saw anything like that. I was like, wow. Yeah. It was so attractive, really. And then, you know, I made performance, and I was taking my stomach. And he really was so gentle, helped me with the wounds, put alcohol bandage, and then we disappeared. And the same evening, it was, you know, a celebration that all the people who work on the on this project, we went to Turkish restaurant to have a dinner. And this was my birthday. And I said to everybody, let's have a drink, it's my birthday. And or I stand up and say, My birthday too, also. And I said, Don't trust you. And he came with this diary with the 13th November missing. And I could not believe I have the same diary, 13 November missing. Because my birthday was shitty for me. Because I don't, you know the story about my birthday.

I do, but if you don't mind telling it to me.

You know, the story is that my mother always told me that I was born 29, which is day of a public. And all the kids born at 29 would go to Tito, sit on his lap, and get candies and presents. And every time came this, my mother said I was not good enough. So I never was invited. And then to the point that I realized that I was never even born 29. I was born the 30 way of talking punishment, like one of the punishments. Anyway, so I hated my brother. I said, I always take out. And he didn't like his either. And that night, I mean, after the dinner, we just went to his home. And I think we stayed in bed for 10 days. And it was very passionate, once the sex. And then I have to go home. I was also married. Aha, well, I forgot about that detail. I was a little bit married. So I called a little bit. And I spent three months and I was calling all the time. We record all the recordings. We have it. We're going to translate them.

Oh wow, that's right.

We have these recordings from Belgrade in cassettes. Unbelievable. All this love. But then after that, the bill of telephone was so hard. My mother told me it was this rule but the telephone put in the cupboard and closet. I could not find it. And then and then I remember, I remember that I we decided we're going to meet in Prague, which is a geographical middle between Belgrade and Amsterdam. And it took uh KLM and he arrived on time, and I took airflow, Russian, and I was six hours late. And you had lots of water waiting for me. And then we went to the only hotel we could afford, Hotel Paris, was totally fucked up. And I remember it was it was the radio that you can never switch off because it's also the recording of the conversations. And it was like then we met some kind of wonderful conceptual artists in those days. And then we we decided we're going to live together. So I went back to Belgrade and then I took only my negatives, no clothes, not that with a second-class train. And I went to Amsterdam. My mother went to police and asked, you know, they say that I'm missing. And then they say, but how old is your daughter? I said, Comrade Amramovich, it's about time. We have better stuff to do. Please go home. And that was the end of the story. And then we start living together.

I next asked Marina about planning a temporal action. Part of the appeal is that it happens just once, and some people are there to see it, and then if you missed it, you missed it. But in terms of being an artist who has things that you can sell or that can be in a museum that are relics of an event, you need to have some physical things left over from it. I asked whether an action would have been as successful and as satisfying if there were no record of it at all, no photos, no films, or whether these relics are important to making it the sort of work that we can then study in art history classes and look at in books.

We didn't serve anything. We never think of the existing of the market or such a thing. It was totally unknown to us. And also, you know, I tell you my attitude, like when I made uh rhythm zero with the 76 objects, I asked the director of the gallery, I expect to throw everything away. I didn't want to have any relics. And if I'm to read the piece, I will literally go and buy the objects and put them there. But he didn't listen to me. So he kept three, four, five things. We are still fighting over it. So when I actually donate this piece here to the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubiana, I actually made the list and we just bought the pieces. And now we have it also another, we have an addition of three, and that one is in uh in Tate, also bought it. I don't care. I hated relics. But then there was a big exhibition in Museum in the Modern Art in Los Angeles. And Paul Schimer, the chief curator, he came with Urtua and me and asked about the car. Because the car was not only on living, but also we work and we made the performances of the car. And he was making a very interesting show, first time that kind of show, out of action with objects. Everything you just said, what is left over. Let's say Gina Pan and the French artist, if she will cut anything on her body, she will have a piece of white cloth and make the print. And there will be blood stain, and that was the project. Chris Burden, science fiction, work on Volkswagen, the two golden names that he crucified himself. That was in the box. You could buy for $2,000 at the time, you can never buy otherwise. But anyway, so that was all part of the show. Lots of pieces of your corn and sure stuff. But we didn't have anything. We only what we had, it was the car. But then the time when when we you know stopped leaving the car and we went to Australia, we sold the car. And we sold to the car to the one uh alternative filmmaker, Cinema. He was transporting rails from city to city, and we give to him. And then when Paul Schimmler came to Amsterdam to look for the car, we said, no idea. And we give him others to this guy. So you went to this guy, and this guy said, I sold to somebody in South of France. So he was like a Shermot Holmes. He went to South of France and found the car who's not working anymore in the backyard to keep chickens inside. So now he was so crazy that he bought the car back to the museum, cleaned the chicken sheet, it was not easy, and brought the car to Los Angeles. So we had that car in that show, which is really important show, we have cut through. Then that car went to Japan, the Museum Modern Art. From Japan went to Lyon, and Lyon bought the car. So the car now for that show, in the with Ulay called Art Vital, the car is coming. It's going to be in the in the absolute answers of the exhibition.

That car is in the exhibition, which runs from November 30th, 2025, until May 3rd, 2026. Art Vital covers the 12 years during which Marina and Ulai worked as an artistic tandem from 1976 until 1988. It is curated by Alenka Grigorić and Felicitas Thun-Hochenstein, and a big thank you for making it possible must go to Lena Pislyak, Ulai's widow, who runs the Ulai Foundation. My book, entitled There's a Criminal Touch to Art, was written in collaboration with the Ulai Foundation and the Abramovich Institute. I could never have written it without the support and enthusiasm of Marina and Lena. My book is a monograph on the December 12, 1976 Art Theft as Artistic Action, when Uly stole Hitler's favorite painting, The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzwig, from a museum in Berlin. He brought it directly to the home of an immigrant Turkish family in the then down and out neighborhood of Kreutzberg. He hung the kitshi painting on the family's wall, then phoned the museum director to turn himself in and tell him where the painting could be retrieved. He made it clear that this was not a traditional theft, but an artistic action with a political message. One chapter of my book features Ulai's personal account of this event and its aftermath, based on interviews I conducted with him. Another chapter features Marina's view of the same event since she was present to photograph Ulai's action that day. Here is what she said.

I think that we'll like to start thinking actually a reason why he wanted to do that. And I think the reason this is really interesting. When we start our relationship, everybody came with his own language. I came with language of performance, and he came with language of photography Polaroids. And he only had a very few actually performances. I think life, maybe one or two maximum watchers with Julian Klauke, and one with himself. And everything else was actually photographic work with public was not present in any possible way. And I think that he felt that he wanted to do something to equalize that kind of our relationship and to make the performance on his side also in his agenda. And I remember when I decided to to leave Yugoslavia and to work and live with him, that I needed to make three performances. That was a kind of goodbye. One was Free in the Voice, which I screamed till I can't scream anymore. One was, you know, the Free in the Memory. I tell the worst that I can't remember anymore, like four hours or whatever. Everything in my head came in. And then the last one was also in Berlin, actually also hitting a Spitzer. And this used to clean the body. When I have the black scar on my face naked, and I have an African drummer, and he was drumming, and I was just moving my body till I can't move anymore, and after six hours I collapsed. So this was all done actually before in Spitzer. And in this period, he wanted to do something also in Berlin because of German, and to do something that you know that he had an idea, but actually never never came to be the real. So I can't really tell for sure if he had this idea before our relationship or not. This is something that will be interesting to decide around that because I don't know. I know I somehow know that he's not talking about Spitzweck. It's talking about Hitler and uh, you know, that was his favorite painting, and then also the Spitzweig painted three of them, not one. And there are some replica in Munich and somewhere else. So I didn't know much much of this, all the story. But I think that painting was for me one of the horrible kits. Horrible. The painter presented, you know, in his bed, you know, with a little umbrella because everything's raining and collapsing and poverty and so. And then I remembered those days that when he got more and more enthusiastic about the idea that he really wanted to plan like a bank robbery. It was very important for him timing when the guards are going, coming, you know, changing in the museum, how the guards look like and the young and the old, uh, to understand if they have weapons, they don't have weapons. And then also on the you know, exits, the fire exits and the and the rolling door in the middle of the museum, and then when the public is the most there on the weekends or during the working day. And then really he was also thinking about the what he should dress, like I don't know, Adi does probably, I don't remember, sneakers that come fast, it can run. But at the same time, we were it was the middle of the winter, so we also have to think about the you know, go to sleep. And then for him was very important if you take this painting from the wall that will not be damaged because it's really priced. The concept was important, but not damaging art piece. And then, a part of all this, it was this problem with the car because we had a like shitty car, you know, who never start, especially not in the winter. So he had to actually have the car leave running and that that he can not have the problem with uh starting, because then the guard, if you run after him, he would just get it. So this was so much planning involved. Then I remembered we went to Renel Block, which in those days was galleries to present Fuchs as artists, Duncan Pine, Joseph Morris, and all these people, and to tell him about action. And he was like pretty much impressed, and then also somehow he was not happy to know that because he it it was really breaking the law. But he so he knew it, but he didn't want it to, you know, to do anything about or you know, not to tell anybody, but at the same time he hated that he actually had to keep the secret. And then I think I'm not sure about because you know, when I was talking German so much in those days, I don't know that we had a lawyer already, that he had a lawyer, that he actually gave all the information to the lawyer, that this is uh you know hard action and so on, so that it's protecting that side. And then my function at that time was that actually I'm so bad in anything, technology, I'm bad in you know, telephone, computer, fine, anything, you know. And I I was very, very worried about my part. But my part was really to have superate the the camera and to film that moment when he's taking stuff on the wall. And then also immediately take this cassette, put in my boots, and then put new one. So the police come. Actually, I was filming police coming, and everybody saw me with camera, so police came straight to me and said, you know, to give you material, and I immediately took camera in in a cassette from the camera, give them this whole thing, and and at the same time they they could see themselves coming, so there was nowhere to go. But then, which is interesting to me, first of all, it was really wow, it was something that we know we are breaking the law. And it was so much intensity that that day it was especially cold. And then also when he we entered the museum, starts snowing. Oh, by the way, part of that, he he really wanted to document well. And then he found the Fassbinder filmmaker, the the cameraman, who actually was immediately interested because for him anything Fassbinder was so such uh always angry in whatever he was doing, and Fassbinder died, he was like, you know, no action, so he was like excited to do that. So he said yes immediately. And I didn't ever have contact with him and never met him, but it was really the all right relationship. And also he wanted to make sure that this action is his own work, that it's nothing to do with my work, because I was finishing my free body poetry and the memory, and he was doing spitzweck, something to do from his childhood, Nazi, you know, born with the you know, with the swastika and his birthday. So that was really his thing. And and I just wanted to be like literally um the somebody that I just recalled moment. So then I remembered God waking in the morning and being incredibly nervous, most of us hardly talking, and um you know, dressing up, going to the museum, and not too many people. I don't think it was more than twelve maximum eleven, twelve people, and all different types. There was old couples, there was uh somebody with a child, there was somebody, you know, just random people. And uh, you know, it was loud, the the speech speeds were on the in the below floor, not on the ground floor. And I remember that everything has to be very fast. That you have to take it, you know, put it in the plastic bag and run, and you have to, you know, break the the the exit, yeah, the fire exit next to the revolving door. And I remember I I filmed that moment, put a cassette in, and I go immediately up, and alarm start right away. And only what I saw is the entire family stuck in the in a turning door. And I think it was with a child or one child, two child, and it was this strange image of frozen family in the answers, and then total cars, you know, alarm and running guards. And the and I saw the one guard run very close to him outside. And I was so afraid that he had a pistol get shot. But the good thing about the sorting, all guards are old. Yes, true. And that was a even a good point. So basically, easily he could run away. He went into the car, get the car, it was you know running, and the other one, the the guy that who was swimming the from from fast winter, came back, what is his name? I don't remember. But all this I could not see because basically the car was around the the the museum, and I only saw him running, and I saw the guy running, and I saw the Olight just kind of went faster. So the guy gave up. So the guy was coming back. So I knew that Olay was in the car. And then after that, everything rose. The police came very soon, and we all nobody could leave the space because we were so stuck. And then they come to me and give a cassette, and then after that we all had to sit down and give the statements, which was incredible. That it was to me entirely. This event was like a Kurosawa, a shaman movie. Yeah. Like you have uh seven people in the forest, and each of them saw part of killing, yeah, and they sit around the fire and tell the story. And every story is completely different, and you can't make any sense. This was exactly like this. Somebody said he was small with glasses, another one he was saying he was a tall and uh with uh long hair, another one said no, he was bald. It was a description of of so many different people, but very much very little to do with really rule like and and then we could not leave for three four hours anywhere. So I have no idea if how far he is with this action. Because the idea is that he would go, you know, to the Kreutzberg and find the telephone booths and phone the director of museum and tell him that it's not art action and then he will go to Turkish family which he visited before and take the kids from the wall and then put the you know the Nazi kids on the wall and invite them to see. So when I really succeed to get to Kreutzberg, find a telephone box and you can see from the movie he was so nervous and his voice was different. Everything was incredible because and it was unbelievable romantic because there's snow everywhere. Snow started getting more and more dense. So I remember looking from the from the later on in the movie that he said to call to the museum and telling that the the work is not damaged and that you have to come to see it. And of course you know in those days the director he was with assistant and he the entire police was informed. So they was thinking there was a red army or red brigade like the kind of action because later on in newspaper in the in the tableau it was that the Lincoln Radic radicale dropped unser the show something our left radical the the stole our most beautiful painting. So this horror spitfield became one of the most beautiful international paintings. So they completely surround the so you went to Turkish family but they completely surrounded the all the Kreutzbell area up with the police and stuff. And then I and then I think he never met the director because he never came I don't know what happened to the director I think he was he he just police arrest him. So this is the part that I know and I know that he went to prison and then the lawyer was there so so everything came out to be the art action. It was incredibly kind of heroic yeah he I was very proud of him and and that was really the moment that actually our relationship got pitotabos because of that.

Slovenia has become a strong center for contemporary art and one that will only get stronger when the Muse Lach opens in Blit. If you're interested in the book There's a Criminal Touch to Art, how Ulay stole Hitler's favorite painting and redefined performance art, it's published by Bloomsbury. If you're in Slovenia be sure to go and see the Art Vital exhibition. It's a big enough deal that contemporary art fans are flying to Ljubljana just to see it. What a privilege to have the work of two true icons of art on display here. Voila and thank you for listening to Feel Slovenia the podcast this podcast is brought to you by the Slovenian Tourist Board and was written and presented by Dr. Noah Charney. Please subscribe to get each new episode and tell all of your friends interested in travel and all things Slovenia. If you'd like to learn more visit Slovenia.info for more information you're welcome to follow our social media channels feel Slovenia on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TripAdvisor