Marina Abramovic
Belgrade (Serbia and 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.

The Lips of Thomas, 1975-1997

This piece by Marina Abramovi´c constitutes a photographic record of the Yugoslavian artist in the midst of one of the performances she carried out in the decade of the seventies, during her solitary period, 1970 thru 1975. The image portrays a frontal view of the artists’ belly being tortured physically: Abramovi´c had just cut herself, etching a five-pointed star into her skin, the blood had begun to flow uncontrollably, and the artist was still holding the knife she used to injure herself.
The symbol represented on her stomach has strong biographical and allegorical connotations, for the artist was born and raised in a political context linked to communism and this fact in some way has left its mark on her existence. Abramovi´c has recognised how through this painful act, repeated on numerous occasions throughout her life, her vital tensions are diffused. Sometimes the star is shown upside-down, and other times it is in its regular position.
The performance The Lips of Thomas was produced at the Krinzinger gallery of Innsbruck, Austria in 1975. It consisted of a two-hour long performance in which Abramovi´c, nude and sitting on a table, first ate a kilo of honey with a silver spoon and afterward drank a litre of red wine from a glass cup. Once this process was over, the artist broke the glass, and then began cutting the five-pointed star onto her stomach while simultaneously hitting herself violently until she no longer felt any pain. Afterwards, the artist lay down face up on top of an enormous cross made of blocks of ice. A heater facing her belly made the blood flow from the lesions. Marina Abramovi´c stayed in that position for thirty minutes, while her body began to freeze, until the audience interrupted the action, taking away the blocks of ice from underneath the artist.
The meaning of the piece is intimately related to the artists’ personal experience. Abramovi´c has built a conceptual grid in which the biographical facts, the symbols (the cross and the star) as well as her own suffering, are interwoven and interrelated, thus giving rise to a sort of liberating sacrifice in which she represents both the victim and the executioner. A. S.

Pietà, 1993

This large-scale format photograph shows us another pivotal moment from one of the young Yugoslavian artist’s performances. On this occasion, the piece in question is Anima Mundi, performed in two parts, and which could be staged in diverse spaces. Marina is not alone in the picture; she appears together with her long-standing companion, the German artist Ulay.
The image reinterprets one of the great iconographic motifs of Christianity, connected, in turn, with art history. In the photograph, pertaining to the “second act” of the performance, the artist is presented leaning on a stairway-platform, dressed in a red suit that reveals her shoulders. She is embracing Ulay, who is all dressed in white and who lets himself fall onto Abramovi´c’s lap, drawing an “M”. In the first part of the performance, however, the artists had refrained from making physical contact, remaining face to face one in front of the other with open arms.
Marina Abramovi´c assimilates and inwardly mingles universal symbols in her particular reading of the world. Here, alongside Ulay, resorting to a visual scheme inherited from the Christian tradition, the artist orchestrates an impressive visual choreography about human feelings. A. S.