Marina Abramović

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe—a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China. Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

At once radical, controversial and revered, Marina Abramovic is the progenitor of contemporary performance art At once radical, controversial and revered, Marina Abramovic is one of the most discussed artists today. Famous for her groundbreaking performance works, she continues to expand the boundaries of art. This publication, accompanying her first major retrospective in Europe, gives an extensive overview of her work from the earliest years until today: film, photography, paintings and objects, installations and archival material. Since the early 1970s Abramovic has explored the intersection between performing and visual art in her work and, though rarely overtly political, posed questions of power and hierarchy. In addressing fundamental issues of our existence and seeking the core of such notions as loss, memory, pain endurance and trust, she both provokes and moves.

In the summer 2015, famous performance artist Marina Abramovic and psychanalyst Jeannette Fischer spent four days together at Abramovic’s house in the Hudson Valley. Associating freely, they took a psychoanalytical perspective for a lengthy exploration of Abramovic’s biography and art and their interrelation. ​Abramovic went into this discussion in hopes of reaching a better understanding of herself, her personality, and her work. Conversations with artists are widely available, she notes, but a chance to use psychoanalysis to put an artist’s life and work in context is much rarer. The resulting book is neither a therapist’s report nor a Fischer’s analysis of Abramovic. Rather, it is a search for understanding conducted by the pair, looking for the structures and dynamics that underlie Abramovic’s life and art. The dialogues are presented along with Fischer’s comments on them and images of some of Abramovic’s performances that are referred to in the discussion.