Born in 1946 in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, Marina Abramović led performance art from its experimental beginnings in the 1970s to its peak.

After putting herself in danger for over fifty-five years and still active today, the artist is being honored with a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. A true consecration marked by the performance of four of her iconic works, reenacted live by artists.

A look back at a few key dates in the extraordinary career of someone who seeks to explore not only the limits of the body, but also those of the mind.

In 1973, in Edinburgh, Marina Abramović played a game of stabbing a sharp knife faster and faster between her fingers to overcome the fear and pain of the wounds that caused her to bleed profusely. This inaugural performance was decisive in shaping her artistic direction. A year later, in Rhythm 0, performed for six hours in a Naples gallery, the artist offered herself as a sacrificial victim to the whims of visitors, who were free to manipulate her body-object using 72 objects of pleasure or pain displayed on a table, including a feather boa, lipstick, nails, flowers, honey, a box of matches, a (loaded) pistol, and a pair of scissors…

In 1975, she cut the skin of her stomach with a razor blade to create a five-pointed star. In 1977, Imponderabilia was interrupted by the police: Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay, standing naked facing each other at the entrance to the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, forced the public to brush past them to enter the museum… Also in 1977, in Breathing In, Breathing Out, Abramović and Ulay kissed each other until they nearly choked, while in AAA-AAA, they screamed at each other for fifteen minutes…

EXPLORING THE LIMITS OF BODY AND MIND

Ten years later, Marina Abramović won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale with Balkan Baroque, a performance installation consisting of a pile of bloody bones which she painstakingly scraped one by one while a video displayed images of war… In 2005, at the Basel art fair, the artist revived her Nude with Skeleton, created in 2002: lying naked beneath a skeleton on a platform suspended 3 meters above the ground, she wept for 3 hours and 45 minutes over the misery of the world until she formed a pool of tears…

Finally, let us mention the participatory performance entitled The Artist Is Present which in 2010 drew crowds to the MoMA in New York: for three months, she remained seated on a chair seven hours a day, six days a week – a total of seven hundred and thirty-six hours and thirty minutes – without eating or drinking, waiting for a spectator to sit opposite her so they could look into each other's eyes in order to abolish time, to be in the present…

It was to transmit this art of self-mastery and endurance in performance that the artist founded the Marina Abramović Institute in 2016. Through meditative and spiritual techniques drawn from her experiences within various communities—Ibetan, Aboriginal, and shamanic—she teaches the art of pushing "the limits of body and mind." A quest for transcendence very much in tune with the times…

“AFTER LIFE”
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
BURLINGTON HOUSE, PICCADILLY, LONDON (ENGLAND)
UNTIL JANUARY 1, 2024
ROYALACADEMY.ORG.UK
MAY.ART