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.
The body has always been both her subject and
medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualise the
simple actions of everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger
in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. From 1975-88,
Abramović and the German artist Ulay performed together, dealing with relations
of duality. She returned to solo performances in 1989 and for The
Artist Is Present (2010) she sat motionless for at least eight hours
per day over three months, engaged in silent eye-contact with hundreds of
strangers one by one.
Marina 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. 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 Copenhagen, Denmark and
Henie Onstad, Sanvika, Norway (2017) and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany
(2018). In 2020, Abramović will be the first female artist to host a major solo
exhibition in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Select
solo exhibitions include ‘The Kitchen’ at Zuecca Project Space, Venice, Italy
(2017); ‘As One’, NEON + MAI, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2017); ‘The Space
In Between Marina Abramović and Brazil’, SXSW, Austin, Texas, USA (2016);
‘Terra Comunal – Marina Abramović + MAI’, SESC, Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil
(2015); ‘512 Hours’, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2014); ‘Holding
Emptiness’, Contemporary Art Center, Malaga, Spain (2014); ‘‘The Life and Death
of Marina Abramović’ (with Robert Wilson), Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY,
USA (2013); ‘Balkan Stories’, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2012); ‘The
Abramović Method’, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy (2012); ‘The
Artist Is Present’, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia
(2011); ‘The Artist is Present’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA
(2010); and ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ at the
Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2005). Abramović has participated in many
large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976, 1997)
and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992). She has
also established the MAI (Marina Abramović Institute) to support the future
exploration and promotion of performance art.
