A trailblazer of performance art, Marina Abramović has spent over five decades using her own body as both subject and medium, consistently pushing the boundaries of physical and mental endurance. Her radical performances have redefined the relationship between artist and audience, often making viewers not just witnesses, but participants.
Born in Belgrade during Yugoslavia’s communist regime, Abramović was raised by parents celebrated as national heroes for their roles in the anti-Nazi resistance. The strict discipline of her upbringing profoundly influenced her artistic rigor. “Your own private life is nothing. You have absolutely to dedicate your life to higher cause. This really follows me all my life and shaped a huge amount of my willpower and discipline,” she recalls.
Abramović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade but from early on she gravitated toward performance as a means of exploring presence, vulnerability, and human limits. In the seminal Rhythm 0 (1974), she laid out 72 objects—including a loaded gun—and allowed the audience to use them on her as they wished, revealing the dark complexities of human behavior. “I never rehearse my performances. I always try them in front of the public and then see how it goes. Because I could never do anything by myself without the public. The public gives you this extra energy that can actually push your limits.”
From 1975 to 1988, she collaborated with German artist Ulay, creating works centered on duality and connection. Their parting work, The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988), involved walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle and say goodbye—an epic metaphor for closure.
Her iconic solo piece, The Artist Is Present (2010), was staged at MoMA, New York. For nearly three months, she sat silently across from museum visitors, gazing into their eyes one by one. The performance drew over 850,000 people, breaking attendance records. She trained rigorously both mentally and physically, for the piece. “For me, creating art is the same as living,” she states. “The public in the 21st century is tired of looking at something. They want to be part of something. They are observed by me. They have to go into themselves, and that creates enormous emotions. They just cry and come back many times again and wait and cry. It was a hell, but it was worth it.”
Abramović has exhibited extensively across the world—from the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Centre Pompidou to solo retrospectives in Oxford, Berlin, and Stockholm. Her video installation Balkan Baroque earned her the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2006, she received the U.S. Art Critics Association Award for Best Exhibition of Time-Based Art for her performance series Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Education is a core part of her legacy. She has taught widely in Europe and the U.S., and in 2012 founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), devoted to long-duration performance and interdisciplinary collaboration.
In 2023, Abramović held a major solo show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, becoming the first woman in the institution’s 250-year history to occupy the entire gallery space, attracting a new generation of admirers. The exhibition is set to tour Europe through 2026.
Her work remains thought-provoking, sometimes shocking, but always passionate and as such she continues to attract an audience of young and old. She currently lives in New York.
Over the course of her career, she has received the Bessie Award (USA, 2003), the Austrian Decoration of Honor (2008), the Berlin Film Festival Audience Award (2012), membership in the National Academy (USA, 2013), the Globart Award (Austria, 2018), the Princess of Asturias Award (Spain, 2021), the Gusi Peace Prize (Philippines, 2021), the Sonning Prize (Denmark, 2023), the Order of Arts and Letters (France, 2023), and multiple honorary degrees recognizing her global impact.