Marina Abramović Director

Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade. A representative of body art, she is a pioneer of using performance as a form of visual art. Her work explores the physical and psychological limits of human endurance and reveals the fragility and fears that induce certain behavioural traits. The female body is the focal point of her performances. In 1997, her video performance installation Balkan Baroque earned her the Golden Lion for best Artist at the Venice Biennale. In 2010, a retrospective of her work was presented at New York’s MoMA. Whilst there, Marina Abramović staged a performance entitled The Artist is Present (2010). Over a period of 716 hours, visitors came one by one and sat down in a chair opposite her. Following a European tour in early 2011, the autobiographical play The Life and Death of Marina Abramović was performed at the Manchester International Festival under the direction of Robert Wilson. She also worked with the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for the production of Boléro at the Paris Opera in 2013. Matthew Akers also filmed a documentary about her called The Artist is Present, which was based on the MoMa retrospective of 2010. In 2012, Marina Abramović established the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI), a platform intended to create new collaborative possibilities between researchers from all fields. She is the author of several written works, the most recent of which, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir was published by Crown Archetype in 2016. In February 2017, she presented The Cleaner, a retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. That exhibition was subsequently presented in Denmark (the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art), Norway (the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo), Germany (the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn),Italy (the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence), Poland (the Znaki Czasu Centre for Contemporary Art in Toruń) and Serbia (the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade).