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Ulay awarded €250,000 in back royalties from Marina Abramović by Dutch court

Ben Quinn and Noah Charney report for the Guardian that a Dutch court has ordered performance art doyenne Marina Abramović to pay her former collaborator and partner Ulay, aka Frank Uwe Laysiepen, €250,000 in back royalties and €23,000 in court fees. For all intents and purposes, Abramović is having a rough summer, just last month getting into hot water for extremely problematic comments on Australian Aboriginals in her forthcoming biography.

Read Quinn and Charney in partial below, in full via the Guardian.

Nearly a year on from the launch of Ulay’s lawsuit against Abramović however, a Dutch court on Wednesday ordered her to pay him more than €250,000 arising from the sales of joint works and a commercial re-enactment for Adidas of a joint piece.

Ulay launched a lawsuit last year in which he claimed that Abramović has violated a contract they signed in 1999 covering works they had created together. He claimed that Abramović failed to provide him with accurate statements of sales, and had paid him only four times in the course of 16 years.

In its ruling, the court in Amsterdam found that Ulay was entitled to royalties of 20% net on the sales of their works, as specified in the original 1999 contract, and ordered Abramović to back date royalties of more than €250,000 (£215,000) as well as more than €23,000 in legal costs

Additionally, she was ordered to provide full accreditation to joint works listed as by “Ulay/Abramović” covering the period from 1976 to 1980 and “Abramović/Ulay” for those from 1981 to 1988.

Abramović was also given two weeks to provide a complete written record relating to all reproductions, copies made of work from 2007 to the present, and sales.

Ulay sounded remarkably respectful (though not without a little drama) regarding the whole affair:

On Wednesday, Ulay described the protracted legal dispute as “unpleasant and distressful” and likened the battle to his own successful victory over cancer.

“I won the case on the most crucial points,” he said. “The relief was like shedding my skin, physical and mental.

**Image: Ulay/Marina, “AAA-AAA” (1977), via Pomenanz Collection