Marina Abramović

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form. She created some of the most important early works in this practice, including Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience, as well as Rhythm 5 (1974), where she lay in the centre of a burning five-point star to the point of losing consciousness. These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. They pushed the boundaries of self- discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance.

In 2012, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art, that focuses on performance, long durational works, and the use of the ‘Abramović Method’. MAI is a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.

Abramović was one of the first performance artists to become formally accepted by the institutional museum world with major solo shows taking place throughout Europe and the US over a period of more than 25 years. In 2010, Abramovic had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her first European retrospective ‘The Cleaner’ was presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 2017, followed by presentations at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in C/openhagen, Denmark, Henie Onstad, Sanvika, Norway (2017), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2018), Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun (2019), and concluding at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbia (2019). In 2023, Abramović was the first female artist to host a major solo exhibition in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This show will tour throughout Europe and Asia through 2026. In 2024, Marina opened her first solo exhibition in China, Transforming Energy, at the Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

At the heart of Abramović’s longstanding engagement with energy, geology, and the body is her now-iconic work incorporating crystals and minerals. As she describes: “While walking the Great Wall of China I experienced various energy states. I came to understand that these shifting states were caused by the different minerals present in the ground upon which I walked. Once I returned, I began putting these crystals and minerals into interactive, furniture-like objects. Through these objects, the public could perform instead, and feel something of what I had felt during my experiences.”