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Belgrade (Serbia & Montenegro), 1946

Marina Abramovic s most well-known works are her performances, objects, video-installations and actions designed to be dramatised in scenes replete with highly baroque conceptual elements. The core of her production is her own body, a realm for experimentation and change, the medium used throughout her entire artistic career.

In her beginnings, the artist worked alone, and after a brief stint with sound installations, she began to produce her first performances (Rhythm 4, Rhythm 5, 1974; Rhythm 10, 1975), which sparked much controversy. Following the idea, shared by all performers, of feeling the world through the personal experience of the body, the artist aimed to explore the limits of moral and physical resistance, reflecting on the behavioural patterns of mind and organism. Her idea was to establish an active dialogue with the audience.

From 1975 to 1988, Marina Abramovic worked in collaboration with Ulay. There have been few cases in art history where a sentimental relationship between two artists has been so fruitful on a creative level. Their complicity and mutual attraction, in addition to the harmonious understanding between them, enabled them to create of a body of work focused on their own relationship as a couple. In performances such as Relation Work from 1976, or Interruption in Space from 1977, Abramovi«c and Ulay reflected on the dualistic conditions in which their relationship developed: man/woman, solitude/company, desires/prohibitions. This period concluded with what was to be their last performance together, The Lovers in 1988, where both the ideas of emotional and physical fatigue were addressed; in less than three months, they walked the length of the Great Wall of China, some two thousand kilometres, and each in opposite directions. When they were halfway through their journey, the couple consummated their separation.

After their break-up, Abramovic embarked on a new era. Influenced by a long trip to the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, she started producing object installations, thus opening up a new field of work with Transitory Objects. Since 1992, she has been returning to her work as a performer, continuing with her early interests and the conception of performance as a venue for the liberation of personal phantasms, but also as a means of relating to reality (Dragon Heads, 1992-1994; Cleaning the House, 1995; The Onion, 1996; and Balkan Baroque, 1997). In the latter, which won a Leon de Oro at the Venice Biennial, the artist staged a scene loaded with poignant expressive media. In a semi-darkened room, lit only by three video screens with the image of her parents in silence and of Abramovic stoically reciting a report on the Òrat-wolvesÓ, in a corner, the artist piled up more than two thousand kilos of bones with flesh still on them. Upon this ossuary, loaded with symbolic connotations, due to the fratricidal fighting in the Balkans, Abramovic unfolded her emotionally moving performance, slowly and deep in a reflexive autism, she cleaned the still remaining flesh from the bones. In recent years, Marina Abramovic has never ceased to experiment with artistic codes by employing the new media provided by technical developments (video, film, installations), thereby demonstrating in her maturity a coherent evolution through the expressive means deployed. A. S.