Opening soon at Neue Nationalgalerie: ‘Ulay, Ulay & Abramović’

Opening on 28 November at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Ulay, Ulay & Abramović explores the groundbreaking collaboration between Marina Abramović and Ulay, whose shared practice transformed the possibilities of performance art. Meeting in Amsterdam in 1975, the artists developed an uncompromising approach to performance, using their bodies to investigate identity, vulnerability, endurance and the boundaries between art and life. Their 12-year partnership, from 1976 to 1988, produced seminal works including Relation in Space (1976), presented at the Venice Biennale, and The Lovers (1988), their 90-day journey along the Great Wall of China.

Bringing together videos, photographs, sculptures, drawings, sketches and letters, the exhibition traces the development of their collaborative practice, alongside a selection of Ulay’s early solo works. These include S’he (1973–74), a series of intimate self-portraits exploring identity and transformation, and FOTOTOT (1976), an experiment in which photographs gradually disappear when exposed to light.

The show also revisits Ulay’s 1976 intervention Irritation – There is a Criminal Touch to Art, in which he removed Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet (1839) from the museum and brought it to the home of a Turkish migrant family in Kreuzberg, challenging institutional authority and questions of cultural belonging. Additionally, a live presentation of Imponderabilia (1977), one of Abramović and Ulay’s most significant collaborative performances, will take place daily from 3 to 4:30 pm, inviting visitors to reconsider their own physical presence and relationship to the work.

Ulay, Ulay & Abramović is on view from 28 November 2026 to 2 May 2027.

Explore via Neue Nationalgalerie.

Shown here: Photograph of Ulay and Marina Abramović, 1978. © The Artists, Courtesy Lisson.