The Hero (2001)

The Hero (2001 | 14'21) presents Marina Abramović seated motionless on a white horse, holding a large white flag as the Yugoslav national anthem plays. Drawing on the traditional image of the mounted military hero, Abramović strips the figure of conquest and action. The white flag—associated with surrender, truce, and peace—transforms an image historically tied to masculine authority and victory into one of stillness, vulnerability, and endurance.

The work is also an intimate act of mourning. Abramović created The Hero in memory of her father, Vojin Abramović, a Yugoslav partisan who fought against fascism during the Second World War. Against the disappearance of Yugoslavia and the violent nationalism of the 1990s, the work asks what remains of the heroic image once its promises of strength, patriotism, and military glory are emptied out. The only surrender, Abramović suggests through the work, may ultimately be to mortality itself.

Marina Abramović is a Serbian-born performance and conceptual artist whose work uses the body, duration, stillness, and endurance to explore physical and psychological limits, memory, violence, and the relationship between performer and audience.

FILM BLOCK 3
Continuous screening - see www.gogbot.nl/timetable for the schedule