Blog & insights

Marina Abramović and Ulay met in Amsterdam in 1975, and the connection was instant and consuming. Abramović, Belgrade-born and already known for pushing her body to its physical and psychological limits, found in Ulay a collaborator who matched her appetite for risk. Together they began to explore what they called "the ego" merging their individual identities into a single collaborative being they referred to as "the other."

What followed was a body of work that still unsettles audiences today. In Relation in Space, they ran at each other repeatedly, colliding with increasing force in a bare gallery. In Breathing In/Breathing Out, they locked mouths and breathed each other's air until they nearly passed out from carbon dioxide poisoning. In Rest Energy, Abramović held a bow while Ulay pulled back an arrow aimed directly at her heart, the two of them balanced against each other's body weight a single second of distraction from either party could have ended in tragedy.

These were not performances in the theatrical sense. They were tests of trust so extreme that the possibility of real harm was always present in the room.

For twelve years, Ulay and Abramović lived as nomads, travelling in a van, sleeping in galleries, and treating their romantic partnership as inseparable from their artistic one. They dressed alike, cut their hair the same way, and spoke of themselves as a single four-legged creature. To the art world, they became a symbol of something rare: two individuals so entwined that neither could be fully understood without the other.

By the mid-1980s, cracks had begun to appear beneath the surface of their union. The couple had long planned an ambitious final work, each of them would begin walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, meeting somewhere in the middle after months of solitary trekking, and marry at the point of their reunion. It was to be the ultimate romantic gesture disguised as conceptual art a wedding staged across thousands of miles of ancient stone.

But bureaucratic delays postponed the project for years, and by the time Chinese authorities finally granted permission in 1988, the relationship had already begun to unravel. Ulay had become involved with another woman, their translator, who was pregnant with his child. Rather than cancel the piece, the pair decided to go through with it but transformed its meaning entirely. Instead of a wedding, The Lovers became a farewell. Abramović walked from the Yellow Sea; Ulay walked from the Gobi Desert. Ninety days and roughly 2,500 kilometres later, they met in the middle, embraced one final time, and separated both as artists and as partners. It remains one of the most devastating breakup stories in modern art, a relationship that began in collision and ended in a slow, deliberate, continent-spanning walk toward goodbye.

For more than two decades afterward, the two artists went their separate ways, rarely speaking, their once-fused identity split back into two distinct careers. Abramović continued to push the boundaries of performance art, eventually becoming one of the most recognised living artists in the world. Ulay's path was quieter, marked by photography and a more private practice, often overshadowed by the fame his former partner continued to accumulate.

Then, in 2010, something extraordinary happened.

Abramović staged The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a work in which she sat motionless at a table for over seven hundred hours across nearly three months, inviting museum visitors to sit opposite her, one at a time, and simply look into her eyes. It became a cultural phenomenon, with people queuing overnight for the chance to share a silent moment with her.

Partway through the run, a familiar figure sat down across from her. It was Ulay the man she had walked away from on the Great Wall, appearing unannounced after more than two decades of near-total silence. For a moment, Abramović simply stared, composed, as she had with every visitor before him. Then recognition broke across her face. Her eyes welled. Breaking the strict no-touching rule of the piece, she reached across the table and took his hands.

The room erupted. Strangers wept. A relationship that had once been performed in collisions, held breath, and drawn arrows was now being resolved silently, publicly, unbearably in front of a museum audience decades later.

It seemed, for a moment, like closure. A wound sealed by art, the same medium that had once torn it open.

But those close to the story know that reunion was not the end of it. Within a few short years, Ulay and Abramović would find themselves locked in a bitter legal battle over royalties and authorship of the very works that had once bound them together a dispute that dragged their most intimate collaborations into a courtroom.

So, was that trembling handshake at MoMA a genuine reconciliation, or merely the calm before one final, unresolved confrontation between two artists who had never quite learned how to let each other go?

Perhaps the truer question is the one their whole story leaves behind,  when two people have spent a lifetime unable to tell where the love ends and the art begins, can either one ever really survive without the other?