Marina Abramović, 2014

First realised in 1972 at The Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, Marina Abramović's White Space was a room lined with white paper containing a tape recording of the artist repeating the phrase “I love you”. Visitors were instructed to “Enter the space. Listen.” A second audio work installed in its own environment, The Tree (1971) was heard just outside the gallery, in its central courtyard, where a number of speakers blared out an artificially amplified repetition of birds chirping, the insistent recording perhaps referring to the recorded pronouncements of Josip Broz ‘Tito’, Yugoslavia’s revolutionary socialist leader of the time, whom Abramović’s parents fought with and eventually served under, as military officers in the Communist government.