Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade in 1946, to a Montenegrin father and a Serbian mother. She studied at the Belgrade Academy of Art and began exhibiting in the second half of the 1960s. In 1973, she began her career as a performance artist, which she has continued almost uninterruptedly to the present day, establishing herself as one of the leading figures in Body Art. From 1976 to 1988, she worked as a duo with German artist Ulay: this was the happy period of Relation Works, of their life and artistic partnership, of travels in the great deserts of the planet, of their approach to Eastern disciplines, of continuous nomadism, and of the grand final project on the Great Wall. Following her separation from Ulay, there was a period largely dedicated to the creation of Transitional Objects. She has resided in Amsterdam ever since. In 1992, she resumed her performance work, which took on a theatrical and spectacular dimension, marking a substantial difference from her earlier performances, with particular attention to aspects of glamour and self-irony. She has held solo exhibitions in the major museums and contemporary art centres worldwide, and has participated on several occasions in the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, the Paris Biennale, Trigon in Graz, and the biennials of Sydney, Istanbul, and Lyon. In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation dedicated to performance art.