Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović (b. 1946, Belgrade, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian-American artist whose practice, developed since the late 1960s, has made performance the primary medium for an investigation of the body, time, endurance, and the presence of the performer before an audience. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.

Her early Rhythm series (1973–74) submitted her own body to extremes of pain, risk, and duration — cutting, burning, lying within a star of burning gasoline. From 1976 to 1988 she worked in sustained collaboration with the artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), creating works in which the two bodies became relational material: breathing each other's air, running toward each other at full speed, holding a bow taut between them. The collaboration ended with The Lovers (1988), in which each walked from one end of the Great Wall of China toward the other and parted at the meeting point. Balkan Baroque (1997), performed at the Venice Biennale, received the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion. The Artist is Present (MoMA, 2010), in which she sat silently opposite individual visitors for the entirety of the museum's opening hours across seventy-three days, became one of the most attended performances in MoMA's history. She founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Hudson, New York. In 2023 the Royal Academy of Arts in London presented a major retrospective of her work.

Her performances and associated objects are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim, and institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia. She lives and works in New York.