Image: Photo © Aranya North Arts Center
‘ART VITAL – 12 Years of the Ulay / Marina Abramović Tandem’ is on view at Aranya Art Center North in Qinhuangdao, China, the first stop on an international tour of the exhibition produced by Cukrarna Gallery, part of the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML). The Chinese presentation opened on 31 July 2026 and runs until 28 February 2027, after the project’s first showing in Ljubljana from 30 November 2025 to 10 May 2026. It then continues to Berlin, opening at the Neue Nationalgalerie on 27 November 2026.
A special event at Aranya Art Center North on Friday 14 August 2026 was attended by Boštjan Malovrh, Slovenia’s ambassador in Beijing. Alenka Gregorič, Cukrarna’s artistic director and the exhibition’s co-curator, and Lena Pislak, director of the Ulay Foundation, introduced the project to the Chinese audience and took part in the accompanying programme over the following days, discussing the artistic and personal partnership of Ulay and Marina Abramović and the origins of the Ljubljana exhibition.
The exhibition examines the twelve years in which the two artists lived and worked together. The curatorial concept was developed by Gregorič with Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the installation at Aranya Art Center North was realised together with curator Sherry Lai of SPURS Gallery. The project was produced by Cukrarna / Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana in close collaboration with Marina Abramović, the Marina Abramović Archives with coordinator Sydney Fishman, and the Ulay Foundation under Lena Pislak.
During the Ljubljana run, Primož Bezjak and Katarina Stegnar reperformed Work Relation five times — the piece Ulay and Abramović first performed at a festival in Arnhem in 1978. The reperformance was also included in the programme around the opening in China.
The Chinese staging was designed specifically for the spaces of Aranya Art Center North and sets up a new geographic resonance: Shanhaiguan, where Abramović began her three-month walk along the Great Wall of China in 1988, documented in the film The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk, lies roughly 60 kilometres away. The Ljubljana presentation carried a different charge, as Ulay spent the last years of his life in the city.
Cukrarna Gallery is a contemporary art venue in Ljubljana operated by the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, a public institution founded by the City of Ljubljana.
