Marina Abramovic

Over the past half century, Marina Abramovic has earned worldwide acclaim as a pioneer of performance art. In the fall of 2023 the Royal Academy in London is staging a massive exhibition featuring works from her entire career. Re-performances of some of her best-known and most radical works join new works created for the exhibition. Produced in collaboration with the artist, this important publication brings expert voices into the debate that Abramovic’s work engenders. How far should an artist push herself in pursuit of her work? What role does the audience play in creating a performance? How can performance art outlive the moment in which it takes place?
Among the book’s authoritative authors are Karen Archey, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London; Svetlana Racanovic, Professor of Theory of Contemporary Art in the Faculty of Fine Arts Cetinje at the University of Montenegro; Andrea Tarsia, curator of the exhibition and Director of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy; Devin Zuber, Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion and Literature at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley and George F. Dole Professor of Swedenborgian Studies at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies, Berkeley. In an interview with Tim Marlow, Abramovic reflects on her extraordinary career and expands on the ideas behind the exhibition. Using an image-recognition app, images in the book are linked to video content, so readers can see many of Abramovic’s original performance pieces come to life.
Marina Abramovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia, former Yugoslavia, in 1946. Now an icon of performance art, Abramovic is known internationally for her endurance pieces in which she subjects herself to unusual and often extreme conditions. From 1977 to 1988 she worked closely with West German artist Uwe “Ulay" Laysiepen, with whom she produced several of her most significant works. Her 2010 solo piece The Artist Is Present served in part to introduce a new generation to Abramovic’s oeuvre; in this piece, which took place over the course of three months, Abramovic sat at a table in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for eight hours a day as different strangers sat opposite her, holding one another’s gaze for a minute each. She is one of the founders of the Marina Abramovic Institute.

Over the past five decades, Marina Abramovi? (born 1946) has developed an undogmatic, individual approach to the transcendent, expanding extant European religious and mystical traditions by adding elements of shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism. Abramovic’s exhibition in the Kunsthalle Tübingen—curated by Nicole Fritz in close collaboration with Marina Abramovic and her studio—is the first to be devoted to the spiritual aspects of the artist’s work. Alongside documentation from a selection of her major works, this accompanying catalog brings together interdisciplinary essays, authored by a range of experts, which provide new insights into the artist’s work, envisaging it as a form of spiritual exercise at once personal and public, which can be taught to others. To the latter end, in 2007, she founded the Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.

An opera production conceived by the legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic (born 1946), 7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a continuation of the artist's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century. Though she remains one of opera’s greatest singers, Callas’ life was beset by struggle and scandal. Today, the opera diva is remembered for having been a figure of both talent and tragedy.

Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer’s most important roles—in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor and Norma—followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas’ own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself. This clothbound volume serves as a companion to the live performance and provides insight into the conception, planning and execution of Abramovic’s project, probing the many creative elements that make up this dynamic exploration of female suffering.

The performances of Marina Abramovic (born 1946) have pushed the boundaries of self-discovery for both artist and audience, marking radical engagements with time, stillness, energy and pain—from Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist offered herself up as an object of violent experimentation for the audience, to The Artist Is Present (2010), a performance with a three-month duration.

These groundbreaking performances often began their life as drawings and notes, an aspect of the artist's work that has previously been overlooked. Marina Abramovic: Drawings 1963–2017 presents more than 50 years of drawings, sketches, thoughts, dreams and ideas produced in the artist's hand, offering intimate insights into Abramovic's methods, processes and ideas.

“I had a strong personal desire to illustrate Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Ugly Duckling,’” reflects pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic (born 1946). “As a young child and growing adolescent, I felt a complete identification with the story. I, too, was the ugly duckling.”

Andersen’s story of the ugly duckling that endures torment and loneliness before becoming a beautiful swan has resonated with readers since it was first published in 1843. Now, in this beautiful new edition of the classic fairy tale, Abramovic reimagines the story by adding new pen and crayon illustrations to the original text.

This volume is the second publication in a series of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales illustrated by contemporary artists, following the huge success of 2016’s The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen & Yayoi Kusama.

At once radical, controversial and revered, Marina Abramovic is one of the most discussed artists today. Famous for her groundbreaking performance works, she continues to expand the boundaries of art. This publication, accompanying her first major retrospective in Europe, gives an extensive overview of her work from the earliest years until today: film, photography, paintings and objects, installations and archival material.

Since the early 1970s Abramovic has explored the intersection between performing and visual art in her work and, though rarely overtly political, posed questions of power and hierarchy. In addressing fundamental issues of our existence and seeking the core of such notions as loss, memory, pain endurance and trust, she both provokes and moves.

Born in Belgrade just after the end of the Second World War, Marina Abramovic (born 1946) 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. In 2010 she was the subject of an enormously popular retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Marina Abramovic was a pioneer in the use of performance art 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 emotional and spiritual transformation. This volume documents Abramovic's Balkan series of video installations and performances created in the period from 1997 to 2005. The works confront us with the gaps between hope and total destruction, with heroism, idealistic passion, human warmth, and almost unbearable static situations. In her latest work, Balkan Erotic Epic, Abramovic creates new, surprising perspectives on archaic rituals that used erotic powers to influence fate and fortune. These powerful images talk to us about the disavowal of ancient practices, and about something buried deep in our consciousness.

Adelina von Fürstenberg is the founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Geneva and directed Le Magasin, the Centre for Contemporary Art and school for curators, from 1989 to 1994.