Marina Abramović 
The Hero 
Single channel video (b/w, sound) 
14’21” 
2001 
© Marina Abramović 
Courtesy of the Marina Abramovic Archives and LI-MA

About the film
Abramović dedicated The Hero to her father, who was a soldier in World War II. Her mother was helping wounded soldiers at the front line, but at a certain moment got typhus in the middle of a battle. As the story goes, she was lying unconscious in the snow among the wounded soldiers, while Abramović’s father was fighting the enemy with his division, retreating towards the forest where the mother was lying. Passing her on a white horse, the father saw her hair protrude from the top of the blanket. Abramović’s mother had beautiful hair, so he stopped, dismounted his horse, and lifted the blanket. When he saw her, he immediately and without any words carried her away on his horse to unoccupied territory and left her in a village with a peasant family.

Through the fog of the fever she saw his face. She stayed with the peasant family for one month while she was recovering and then she went back to the front line. One year later the wounded soldiers were coming into the improvised hospital where Abramović’s mother was working. She recognized among them, bleeding heavily on a stretcher, Abramović’s father. She found out that he was the same blood group as her, gave her blood for a transfusion and saved his life. Marina Abramović was born one year later. She said about the performance: ‘After my father’s death I decided to make this work. I am sitting motionless on the white horse with a white flag blowing in the wind. I stay there for an indefinite time. The female voice is singing, from her memory, the Yugoslavian national anthem from the time of Tito. The video image is black and white because I wanted to emphasize the past and memory.’

About the artist
Marina Abramović is widely recognised as one of the world’s foremost performance artists. Born in Yugoslavia, she has travelled and worked throughout Europe, the United States, China and Latin America. Following a solo exhibition at IMMA in 1996, Abramović was invited to curate ‘Marking the Territory’ in 2001, which drew together some 30 international performance artists at the Museum. 

Abramović has exhibited internationally at major institutions including the Tate Modern, Royal Academy of Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art. In 2020, she established the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), dedicated to the presentation and preservation of long-duration performance.

For our next Dublin by Dusk event IMMA presents Art in Motion: Routes and Roots Community Celebration, taking place on Thursday 24 September 2026. Join us for an evening of original poetry readings by The Poetry Vigilantes, of Dublin 8’s Fatima Groups United, and the award-winning poet, playwright, and performer Dagogo Hart as compère.

As part of the evening celebrations, a selection of videos capturing the Art in Motion: Routes and Roots project, from the poetry workshops to the final artwork, will be screened on Living Canvas at IMMA. We welcome you to take a moment to watch the videos before or after the celebrations. The videos will be playing from 6.30–9pm.

Discover more about this event here.

About Art in Motion: Routes and Roots
This Summer, IMMA, in partnership with the National Transport Authority (NTA) under its Transport for Ireland (TFI) brand, unveiled a striking new mobile artwork bringing contemporary art to the streets of Dublin.

The artwork, titled Art in Motion: Routes and Roots, is created by artist Alberta Whittle and has been developed in collaboration with poet Dagogo Hart and community writers group The Poetry Vigilantes, part of Dublin 8’s Fatima Groups United.

The vibrant artwork wraps one of TFI’s buses, transforming the familiar public transport vehicle into a moving canvas. Across the bus the artwork displays fragments of an original poem created by The Poetry Vigilantes working with Whittle and Hart. The poetry is combined with imagery in Alberta Whittle’s signature style, featuring the hands of the community participants and yarrow, a perennial wildflower native to Ireland.

Developed through a series of poetry workshops, the bus artwork is inspired by themes explored in Fisherwoman, Fisherwoman. The exhibition combines the work of contemporary artist Alberta Whittle (b. 1980) and renowned painter Camille Souter (1929–2023). During the workshops, led by Whittle and Hart, participants from The Poetry Vigilantes composed original poetry responding to the exhibition and their own lived experiences. These poetic fragments appear across the bus wrap design, celebrating community voices and the power of poetry and art to connect and inspire.

Click here to discover more about this project.

Petros Moris Echoes (2025) is screening as part of the landmark exhibition Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989–2026)

About the film
Echoes are sculptures made of light, ghostly digital appearances that constitute the mirroring “doubles” of physical sculptures that were constructed with geological matter. Their structures emerged from the splicing of animal and vegetal forms with ancient representations of human children, resulting in spectral assemblages oscillating between metamorphosed faces, geological fragments and cosmic bodies. Echoes propose an abstract conception of the face as a biological and cultural interface of recognition and difference, along with the liminal figure of the child as a primordial form of historicized otherness. These contingent symbols bring forward an inversion of the anthropocentric imaginary, maintaining however the paradoxical fate of anthropomorphism as a plea for the bridging and the coexistence with everything that has been considered as non-human.

About the artist
Petros Moris is an artist based in Athens. He has presented solo exhibitions at Radio Athènes (Athens), TAVROS (Athens), Galeria Duarte Sequeira (Braga), PTX (Athens), Delfina Foundation (London), Project Native Informant (London), Point Centre for Contemporary Art (Nicosia) and Duve Gallery (Berlin). He has participated in international group exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial (2025), the Athens Biennale (2021), the Singapore Biennale (2019) and the New Museum Triennial (2018). He has been nominated for the DESTE Prize 2015 and has been awarded the ARTWORKS Fellowship, the Onassis Foundation Scholarship, and the Delfina Foundation Residency. He has been part of the artistic and curatorial collectives KERNEL, SIM and Radical Reading and co-runs the publication project AM Reading Club.