As the hours ticked away and Abramović remained entirely passive—neither flinching, speaking, nor resisting—the crowd's psychology shifted. They began to realize that the rules truly applied. There would be no intervention.
Around the third hour, the violence escalated. The slide images and Abramović’s vivid descriptions tell a horrific story. Someone used scissors to cut away her clothes, leaving her partially naked. Others began to press the limits of sadism: a knife was used to cut her neck, and a participant drank her blood, later covering the wound with a plaster. Rose thorns were pushed into her stomach, and a knife was stuck between her legs deep into the wooden table. marina abramovic rhythm 0 performance video
Everyone ran away. Literally ran. The same people who had cut her, carried her, taunted her, and nearly killed her now fled the gallery, unable to face her as a person again. As the hours ticked away and Abramović remained
But as the evening wore on and Abramović remained completely motionless—offering no resistance, no protest, not even a flinch—the atmosphere began to shift. The art critic Thomas McEvilley, who was present at the performance, later described the chilling progression: Around the third hour, the violence escalated
The piece began at 8 PM. For the first hour, the audience was timid. People offered her a rose, kissed her, or gently moved her arms. The art critic Thomas McEvilley, who was present, wrote that it started tamely: "Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her somewhat intimately".
What circulates today as "Marina Abramović Rhythm 0 performance video" is, in fact, a carefully edited, modern retrospective compilation. The most widely seen version is a 2013 short documentary produced by the Marina Abramović Institute, directed and edited by Milica Zec. It combines:
Because Rhythm 0 took place before the era of ubiquitous digital recording, the surviving video footage and photographic documentation are historically significant.
