Marina Abramović (b.1946, Belgrade, Serbia)
Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her parents were Partisan war heroes who helped fight the Nazis in World War II and held high positions in the communist government. Abramović’s upbringing by her parents was extremely strict, enforcing a 10 pm curfew for Abramović into her twenties. She began her career in performance art in the early 1970s, when she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and many of her early works were a form of rebellion to her oppressive communist upbringing. Abramović’s desire for unrestricted expression of her mental and physical self led her into increasingly conceptual work, gradually moving into sound installations before enacting her first performance piece, Rhythm 10 at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. Over the next year Abramović performed four more pieces, in a series called Rhythms, in which she tested the psychological and physical limitations of her own body, as well as the consciousness of her audience.
Over the past forty years, Abramović has used her body as a tool to test both physical and emotional limits. At the same time that Abramović explores her own physical and psychological limitations, she also challenges passive viewership. Abramović’s performances are characterized by endurance and pain, as well as by repetition, duration, and an emphasis on audience interaction.
Today Abramović is considered one of the most influential figures in the history of performance art, and has been dubbed “the grandmother of performance art.” She is currently in the process of opening her very own Marina Abramović Institute in Hudson, NY. At the MAI, Abramović’s long-durational approach to performance (defined on the MAI website as 6 hours or more), called the Abramović Method, will be taught to the public in order to preserve the legacy of performance art. It is estimated to officially open in 2015. You can visit the official MAI website here.
