ABRAMOVIĆ Marina

Marina Abramović (Belgrade, 1946) has played a decisive role in transforming performance into one of the central languages of contemporary art. Since the 1970s, she has chosen to use her own body not as a subject to be represented, but as the living material of her work, subjecting it to tests of duration, stillness, and endurance. In her actions, the audience does not necessarily remain an outside observer: it can become a conversation partner, witness, and sometimes an active participant in what happens. Her practice spans performance, photography, video, and installation, exploring the relationship between fear and control, memory and presence, trust and responsibility.

Her origins and artistic training

Born in Belgrade on November 30, 1946, in what was then Yugoslavia, Abramović grew up in a family deeply marked by the history of the twentieth century. Both her parents had taken part in the partisan resistance during the Second World War, while her maternal grandmother, connected to religious tradition, passed on a sensitivity to ritual and spirituality. Discipline and the idea of sacrifice on the one hand, and the symbolic value of gestures on the other, are two points of reference that help explain the intensity of her later work.

She studies painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and continues her training in Zagreb. The transition from painting to action happens gradually, as she realizes that the language of painting does not allow her to address the questions that interest her with the same immediacy. In the early 1970s, she therefore begins to make time, concentration, exertion, and risk the very elements of her work: rather than depicting an experience, she chooses to undergo it in front of spectators.

The body and presence as language

Performance art does not necessarily involve producing an object intended to last. It can consist of a gesture, a situation created by the artist, or an encounter that takes shape in a specific place and time. Abramović takes this possibility to its most radical extremes, making the body simultaneously the instrument, subject, and setting of the artistic experience. Vulnerability is not merely evoked: it becomes a real condition, perceptible to those who witness it.

This also explains the decisive role of the spectator. In some performances, their mere presence changes the tension of the action; in others, their decisions determine how it unfolds. L's work is therefore not limited to what the artist does, but also encompasses the relationship established with others and the responsibilities that relationship entails.

The Rhythm series and the limits of responsibility

Between 1973 and 1974, Abramović created the Rhythm series, in which she tested the body's control and its ability to withstand extreme situations. The best-known moment in this exploration is Rhythm 0, presented in 1974 at Studio Morra in Naples. For six hours, the artist remains passive beside a table on which seventy-two objects are arranged, some harmless and others potentially dangerous, which the audience is permitted to use on her.

L’s action gradually takes on an unsettling character, showing how much people's behavior can change when the usual rules of interaction are suspended. The central issue is not only the artist's endurance, but also the responsibility of those who observe and act. Rhythm 0 makes visible the unstable boundary between curiosity, participation, and violence, turning an apparently simple situation into an investigation of collective behavior.

The Partnership with Ulay: Trust and Vulnerability

In 1975, Abramović met Ulay, the pseudonym of Frank Uwe Laysiepen, with whom she shared a long personal and artistic journey until 1988. The performances they created together shifted the focus from the individual body to the relationship between two people, staging balance, dependence, identity, and mutual trust. In Imponderabilia (1977), the two stand naked on either side of a narrow passage, forcing visitors to choose how to pass through: the everyday act of entering an exhibition space thus becomes a decision laden with awareness.

The tension is even more evident in Rest Energy (1980), in which the two artists hold a bow taut, with an arrow pointed at Abramović's heart. Her safety depends on the other's control and on both of them maintaining their balance, a concrete depiction of the vulnerability inherent in placing one's trust in someone. Their partnership comes to a symbolic end in 1988 with The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk: setting out from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, the two meet after a long journey, bringing a decisive period in both their careers to a close.

Dragon Heads: Stillness, Fear, and Symbol

With Dragon Heads, created in 1990, Abramović explores the relationship between the human body, the animal world, and the symbolic dimension of fear. During the performance, she remains still as live snakes move around her and over her body, in a situation that requires concentration and control of her reactions. The presence of the pythons, animals associated in different cultures with transformation, energy, and danger, creates a tension that needs no spectacular movement to feel intense.

The photographs associated with this action preserve the visual power of an event destined, by its nature, to come to an end. They do not fully convey the experience of the performance, but allow us to see how the relationship between stillness and movement, vulnerability and animal presence, was translated into an image capable of continuing to speak to the viewer.

Balkan Baroque and the memory of war

In 1997, Abramović presented Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale, a work for which she received the Golden Lion for best artist. The work arose from confronting the wars that had devastated the former Yugoslavia and addresses the difficulty of processing violence that belongs both to collective history and personal memory. For several days, the artist sat atop a pile of animal bones, attempting to clean them as she sang and recalled memories and stories.

The repetition of a gesture intended never truly to erase the traces of violence becomes the core of the work. Abramović does not depict war through a narrative scene, but makes its weight, hardship and the impossibility of complete purification physically perceptible. The ritual nature of the action thus unites the political dimension with the emotional and symbolic.

The Artist Is Present: the intensity of an encounter

In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a major retrospective to Abramović, accompanied by the performance The Artist Is Present. For more than seven hundred hours in total, spread throughout the exhibition, the artist sat in silence, welcoming visitors one at a time as they chose to sit opposite her. No words or complex gestures were needed: the work took shape through duration and mutual attention.

The participants' reactions, sometimes very intense, show how unusual an experience of uninterrupted presence can be. After decades of actions grounded in physical endurance and risk, Abramović achieves a form of extreme simplicity here. The relationship with the viewer remains at the heart of her practice, but is entrusted to a gesture accessible to everyone: looking and being looked at.

Photographs, videos and collectible artworks

The temporary nature of performance raises an important question: what remains when the action is over? In Abramović's work, photographs and videos can serve different functions, from documenting an event to creating independent artworks, conceived to be presented and preserved according to specific artistic choices. Not every image depicting a performance is therefore automatically an original photographic artwork, and this distinction is fundamental to collecting as well.

When assessing a photographic work attributed to the artist, it is important to verify its provenance, any edition number, printing technique, signature or certification, and state of preservation, carefully distinguishing between historical documents, reproductions, and authorized artworks. Images associated with performances such as Dragon Heads offer a way to connect with significant moments in her artistic explorations, but the nature and value of each print depend on its documented characteristics.

A legacy that transforms our relationship with art

Marina Abramović’s contribution is not limited to the extreme nature of her early performances or the renown of her major museum actions. Her work has helped redefine the roles of the artist and the viewer, showing that shared time, presence, and responsibility can become artistic material. From the risk of Rhythm 0 to the silent concentration of The Artist Is Present, her practice maintains a profound continuity: questioning what happens when one human being truly exposes themselves to another’s gaze.