Inside the Reel Artists Film Festival opening night party featuring the one and only Marina Abramovic!

Date February 24, 2012

It’s not every day that you get to play host to a living, breathing masterpiece! The Canadian Art Foundation was lucky enough to showcase Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic, who was in Toronto for the Canadian premiere of The Artist is Present at the Reel Artists Film Festival. The new documentary film chronicles her prolific and often painful career and follows the preparation for her 2010 retrospective show at the MoMA—she spent more than 700 hours over the course of three months staring into the eyes of museum visitors. Beyond her lifelong love affair with performance art, Abramovic is a designer devotee (having discovered fashion after a particularly nasty breakup); in the film, she’s shown shopping at Givenchy with none other than Riccardo Tisci. It’s no surprise then that the 65-year-old wore head-to-toe Costume National to the premiere, or that she counts Fashion Television’s Jeanne Beker as a fan. At the a swank soiree, held at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and bookended by not one but two cocktail parties, we spotted a smattering of guests from Canada’s creative set including Luminato’s Jörn Weisbrodt (who also made an appearance in the film), the Beckerman clan, and gallery owner Daniel Faria.