Marina Abramovic

"After two or three minutes of sitting motionless you start feeling the body. Then after one hour, two hours, you have muscles and such tension that if you don't move in a second, you think, 'I'm going to faint.' And then when you say to yourself, 'So what if I just faint,' something clicks in your mind and there's no pain anymore. You have to go through such a door of pain to liberate that energy, and people don't get that far into that space to confront such pain."
Marina Abramovic, excerpted from Marina Abramovic: Seven Easy Pieces, Charta.

Marina Abramovic pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has always been both her subject and medium; exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for transformation. Her career began in Belgrade during the early 1970s, and her work has since appeared at The Museum of Modern Art, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The New Museum in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and many others. She has won a Bessie, as the New York Dance and Performance Award is called, and the Venice Biennale's Lion D'Or. In March of 2010, The Museum of Modern Art, New York will present The Artist is Present, documenting 50 years of the artist's ephemeral time- and media-based works from throughout her career.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE KITCHEN
Introduction by Mateo Feijoo.
LA FáBRICA
ISBN: 9788415303374 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 9/30/2012
Active | Awaiting stock

HANS ULRICH OBRIST & MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE CONVERSATION SERIES
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865604750 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 8/30/2010
Active | In stock

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT
Edited by Klaus Biesenbach. Text by Arthur C. Danto, Chrissie Iles, Nancy Spector, Jovana Stokic.
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK
ISBN: 9780870707476 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2010
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MARINA ABRAMOVIC: SEVEN EASY PIECES
Interview by Nancy Spector. Text by Marina Abramovic, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Sandra Umathum.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881586264 | US $59.95
Pub Date: 2/1/2007
Active | Awaiting stock

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE BIOGRAPHY OF BIOGRAPHIES
Essays by Michael Laub, Marina Abramovic. Introduction by Fabrizio Grifasi and Monique Veaute.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881584956 | US $34.95
Pub Date: 1/15/2005
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MARINA ABRAMOVIC: STUDENT BODY
Essays by Miguel Fernandez-Cid, Marina Abramovic and her students.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881584499 | US $80.00
Pub Date: 2/2/2004
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MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE HOUSE WITH THE OCEAN VIEW
Essays by Chrissie Iles, Thomas McEvilley, Sean Kelly, C. Carr, Roselee Goldberg, and Peggy Phelan.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881584369 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 3/2/2004
Active | Awaiting stock

MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Essays by Marina Abramovic, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Raffaello Sanzio and Angela Vettese.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881583652 | US $25.00
Pub Date: 8/2/2002
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MARINA ABRAMOVIC: PERFORMING BODY
Artwork by Marina Abramovic. Contributions by Dobrila de Negri.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881581603 | US $19.95
Pub Date: 9/2/1998
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: PUBLIC BODY
Essays by Marina Abramovic, Germano Celant.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881582952 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 8/2/2001
Out of print | Not available

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE BRIDGE/EL PUENTE
Artwork by Marina Abramovic. Edited by Pablo Rico. Text by Thomas Wulffen.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788448218577 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 1/2/1999
Out of print | Not available

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: ARTIST BODY
Artwork by Marina Abramovic. Contributions by Thomas McEvilley, Bojana Pejic, Toni Stoos.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881581757 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 7/2/1998
Out of print | Not available

Marina Abramovic

Published to accompany the artist's major 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present contains documentation of 50 works from across Abramovic's career, along with texts by curator Klaus Biesenbach and essayists Arthur C. Danto, Chrissie Iles, Nancy Spector and Jovana Stokic. According to Abramovic, "You must confront your own fear. If you're afraid of pain, you have to do to find out what this pain is. When you open the door to pain, you'll find out that you actually might be able to control it. You'll be free from the fear of pain—which is a great feeling." Image above, from the book, is from a 20 minute 1977 performance, Light/Dark, by Abramovic and her collaborator Ulay.

Marina Abramovic: The Kitchen

Introduction by Mateo Feijoo.
Published by La Fábrica

The Kitchen: Homage to Saint Therese is a set of portrait photographs and videos of the “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic (born 1946). Shot in the abandoned space of a kitchen where Carthusian nuns had once fed more than 8,000 orphans, Abramovic is here seen cooking and meditating. Referencing Renaissance painting and the writings of Saint Therese of Ávila, in which the sixteenth-century nun describes her experiences of mystical levitation in church and kitchen, The Kitchen is equally an autobiographical work. “In my childhood,” Abramovic explains, “the kitchen of my grandmother was the center of my world [...] all my best memories come from there.” Accompanying this book’s images is a series of the artist’s own spiritual recipes: a series of haikus, prayers and mantras to liberate the mind from the confused flow of thinking.

Hans Ulrich Obrist & Marina Abramovic: The Conversation Series

Volume 23

Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Over the past three and a half decades, Marina Abramovic’s astonishing oeuvre, with pieces in which she performs feats of extreme endurance or mortification of the flesh, has laid bare--perhaps more than any other artist has done--the human body’s strengths, limitations, vulnerabilities and complex bouquet of meanings. In addition, her projects have simultaneously provoked and deflected intense curiosity about who could possibly want to publicly subject herself to such agonizing conditions: who, in short, is Marina Abramovic? In this revealing set of conversations--conducted in train stations, hotels, galleries and her own private studio--between Abramovic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, with the occasional addition of other interlocutors including Gustav Metzger (the “Old Master of action art”), the artist talks about her work, the strict discipline of her Yugoslav childhood and the process of preparing for her epochal retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Edited by Klaus Biesenbach. Text by Arthur C. Danto, Chrissie Iles, Nancy Spector, Jovana Stokic.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Since the beginning of her career, in Belgrade in the late 1960s, Marina Abramovic has been a pioneer of performance art, creating some of the most important works in the field. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that documents approximately 50 of the artist's ephemeral time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book also discusses a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by Abramovic herself; and re-creations of the artist's works by other performers—the first such to be undertaken in a museum setting. The book spans over four decades of Abramovic's early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with the Dutch artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media and performance art at MoMA, and four distinguished scholars examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. The Artist Is Present also includes a CD with audio commentary by the artist that guides the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book.Born in Belgrade just after the end of the Second World War, Marina Abramovic was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church (her great uncle was a Patriarch and a canonized saint in the Church) and left Yugoslavia in 1976, having already established herself as a performance artist, living in Amsterdam and eventually New York, where she presently lives.

Marina Abramovic: Seven Easy Pieces

Interview by Nancy Spector. Text by Marina Abramovic, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Sandra Umathum.
Published by Charta

This new monograph documents seven consecutive, groundbreaking nights of monumental, solo, body-art performances by the internationally renowned artist, Marina Abramovic, during the Fall of 2005 in the famous rotunda of New York City's Guggenheim Museum. It includes a new piece created by Abramovic specifically for the project, as well as Abramovic's renditions of six other seminal works (by five other artists and herself) from the formative decade, 1965-1975. The works include reenactments of Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972), in which the artist occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors above; Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) in which Export walked through a movie theater in crotchless pants, challenging the audience to turn from the images of women on the screen to a real female body; and Abramovic's own Lips of Thomas (1975), in which she ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine before breaking her glass with her hand, incising a star in her stomach with a razor blade, whipping herself until she "no longer felt pain," then lying down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above her caused her to bleed even more profusely. Also included, Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure, Gina Pane's The Conditioning, and Joseph Beuys's critical exploration, How To Explain Pictures of a Dead Hare. In this important series, Abramovic gives us the opportunity to recall, revive and preserve major historical performance pieces, all of which are inherently ephemeral, in a completely original way. With an interview by the esteemed Guggenheim curator, Nancy Spector.

Marina Abramovic: The Biography Of Biographies

Essays by Michael Laub, Marina Abramovic. Introduction by Fabrizio Grifasi and Monique Veaute.
Published by Charta

While embodying all the fundamental stages of Marina Abramovic's life and work, The Biography of Biographies reveals, through numerous beautiful reproductions, an artist who has deeply affected the art of our time and who possesses an extraordinary ability to revisit and reinterpret her own story through the use of performance as a form of visual art. This new “staging” of The Biography--called The Biography Remix--is carried out in collaboration with Michael Laub, a theater director who has maintained a close involvement with Abramovicï's work and shares with her a deep personal trust. The performance is not theater; it's not dance; it's not even video. Abramovic and Laub have developed a new and sometimes indefinable relationship between visual art, performance and theater--a uniquely direct relationship that builds work of great simplicity and beauty that has the power to move, surprise and entertain.

Marina Abramovic: Student Body

Essays by Miguel Fernandez-Cid, Marina Abramovic and her students.
Published by Charta

After Artist Body and Public Body comes Student Body, a consideration of Marina Abramovic's role as a teacher of performance art, and the ideal and essential conclusion to this trilogy on her and her work. This final volume amasses an impressive amount of documentation on the relationships that the artist has had with her numerous students in academies the world over, from Berlin to Braunschweig, from Tokyo to Kitakyushu. In Italy, amongst other countries, Abramovic has been a visiting professor at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti of Como, an institution with the tradition of inviting some of the leading players on the global contemporary art scene to lecture within its walls. Before beginning any of her courses, at any of the schools at which she has taught, Abramovic always asks her students to undergo a process of total purification--from clothes, food, words, and sex--much as she herself notoriously did in her recent performance at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. This volume contains her most important lectures and a great deal of work by her students themselves, each of whom considers Abramovic as an inalienable point of reference. Please note that the title is meant literally: Student Body is illustrated only with work by Abramovic's students.

Marina Abramovic: The House With The Ocean View

Essays by Chrissie Iles, Thomas McEvilley, Sean Kelly, C. Carr, Roselee Goldberg, and Peggy Phelan.
Published by Charta

For 12 days in November 2002, Marina Abramovic lived on three open platforms in the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. She did not eat or speak, nor did have any privacy: the rooms were open and spectators were even invited to observe the artist through a high-powered telescope. She had no escape: the ladders leaning against bedroom, sitting room and bathroom had rungs made of large butcher knives. Throughout her 30-year career, Abramovic has used her body as her primary material, pushing it to extremes of altered consciousness, often putting herself in great physical peril. Her concern with creating works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life like lying, sitting, dreaming and thinking focuses, in effect, on the manifestation of a unique mental state. In one early solo performances, the artist announced that she would be a passive object for six hours and laid out 72 items spectators could use on her, including a loaded gun. A fight broke out when someone tried to use it. Beginning in the late 70s, she and her then partner Ulay collaborated on now classic performances in which they crawled on their stomachs with a python that hadn't eaten in two weeks; collided with each other, naked, at top speed; sat motionless for seven hours at either end of a long table, trying not even to blink; and, most famously and difficultly, crossed the Great Wall of China, starting at opposite ends and walking until they met in the middle. Abramovic thought The House With the Ocean View would be most like walking this last piece, so she mounted the platforms at Sean Kelly Gallery clad in the old hiking boots she wore in China.
This volume presents documentation of The House With the Ocean View, Abramovic's most important performance work to date, alongside essays by the artist, her gallerist Sean Kelly, art historian Thomas McEvilley, curator Chrissie Iles, and others.
Published in conjunction with the Sean Kelly Gallery

Marina Abramovic

Essays by Marina Abramovic, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Raffaello Sanzio and Angela Vettese.
Published by Charta

In the summer of 2001, Marina Abramovic was a visiting professor at the Corso Superiore de Arte Visiva, Fondazione Ratti of Como, Italy. Her students actively participated in classes based on one of Abramovic's dearest themes: energy. This volume documents her lectures and the work produced by her students.

Marina Abramovic: Public Body

Essays by Marina Abramovic, Germano Celant.
Published by Charta

Public Body is the third book in a trilogy dedicated to Marina Abramovic, and presents the work ''Transitory Objects for Human and Non-Human Use.'' In this work Abramovic built a series of transitory objects with the objective of engendering active audience participation. Abramovic hit upon the idea while she was walking along the Great Wall of China; she realized that it was the first time that she was doing a performance without an audience. To transmit this experience she constructed a series of objects: for ''human use,'' ''spiritual use,'' and ''use of power.'' These objects--made of iron, wood, minerals, pigs' blood, and human hair--all ''contain a certain kind of energy,'' according to Abramovic. She does not see these works as sculptures, but as ephemeral objects that trigger public experiences through direct interaction. Whereas the first two books in the trilogy, Performing Body and Artist Body, focused on the artist and her oeuvre, Public Body flips the proverbial script, enacting a role reversal between artist and audience. The book features an impassioned essay by Abramovic concerning her thoughts on public performance and her recent trips to China, India, Japan, and Brazil, as well as an interview with the artist by Germano Celant.

Marina Abramovic: The Bridge/El Puente

Artwork by Marina Abramovic. Edited by Pablo Rico. Text by Thomas Wulffen.
Published by Charta

Marina Abramovic: Performing Body

Artwork by Marina Abramovic. Contributions by Dobrila de Negri.
Published by Charta

Marina Abramovic: Artist Body

Performances 1969-1998

Artwork by Marina Abramovic. Contributions by Thomas McEvilley, Bojana Pejic, Toni Stoos.
Published by Charta