Ulay, On His Own Terms

Examining the sprawling retrospective of the late performance artist and conceptual photographer Ulay.

- Nina Siegal

Many Know Ulay as the man who walked into Marina Abramovic’s performance “The Artist Is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art a decade ago and brought her to tears. That two-minute encounter between the former collaborators and lovers during her three-month sit-in at the New York museum has been viewed more than 18 million times on YouTube.

Ulay, who met Abramovic in 1974, was her most important collaborator, and the two worked and lived together for a dozen years. Or, as she put it in an interview, “He was the big love story in my life.”

But Ulay, who was a conceptual photographer and a performance artist before and after his work with Abramovic, had a powerful oeuvre of his own, as a sprawling retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam attests.

A recent coronavirus lockdown in the Netherlands has forced the museum to close until at least 20 January, but the show, “Ulay Was Here,” is scheduled to run through 18 April, and could be extended, a spokeswoman for the Stedelijk said.

The exhibition was organised in consultation with Ulay as he was dying from lymphatic cancer last year and in the first months of 2020, his widow, Lena Pislak, said in a telephone interview from their home in Ljubljana, Slovenia.“Till the last, we were working,” she said. “He was really enjoying the process.” Ulay died in March, at age 76, and Pislak said she and Hana Ostan Ozbolt, the director of the Ulay Foundation, worked with the Stedelijk to finish the show.“It was a good healing process for us,” Pislak said. “He would have been so proud.”