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Journalism of Courage
In 2010, when visitors entered a large hall at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and encountered Serbian artist Marina Abramović seated on a wooden chair, they knew something monumental awaited. One by one, they took the chair opposite her and gazed into Abramović’s still eyes. Some of them smiled, others wept but many sat in quiet contemplation. Rather unknowingly, each of them also became part of the artwork and art history. Titled The Artist is Present, the over 700-hour performance over three months, which drew long queues, is often credited for transforming the relationship between the artist and the audience and redefining the understanding of performance art itself.
Abramović had proved yet again that she could surprise and mesmerise. Long after, she continues to test the limits of physical and emotional endurance. Yet, at 79, she refuses to dwell on either. “It’s just a question of making the decision to create a specific time and space and do the performance in front of the public. In that moment you’re concentrated on the message and you enter a different state of mind. I don’t think about the emotional and physical demands of this moment,” she says in an email interview.
Having recently opened an exhibition at Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the US-based artist will deliver a performance lecture at Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in February. Until then, also marking her presence at the showcase will be her immersive projection Waterfall and a presentation by the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) Archive. While the latter highlights a collection of long-duration works and their corresponding documentation, Waterfall offers a more meditative draw as 108 Tibetan monks and nuns will be seen chanting in unison. Based on the Heart Sutra, one of Buddhism’s most profound texts, viewers will be invited to settle into deck chairs and let themselves be immersed. “The public can experience this ocean of human voices. In this way, the Heart Sutra Mantra connects to nature,” says Abramović. Revealing how it took five years to complete, the 2025 Praemium Imperiale award winner adds, “I travelled to different Tibetan monasteries all over India and asked different nuns and monks to sing Heart Sutra and filmed them. When I put them all together, the effect was a sound like a waterfall.”
Born in post-war Yugoslavia to decorated Partisan parents, Abramović grew up caught between two worlds — the strict discipline of her communist home and the ritual-rich spirituality of her Orthodox grandmother. “Childhood is important for every artist and the background where he comes from,” she says, adding, “I was born after World War II and grew up with my Orthodox religious grandmother who hated communism. Later on, I spent most of the time with my communist parents. In my work there’s a mixture between radicalism, heroism, communism and the spirituality of my grandmother. Later on, I travelled and became interested in different cultures and became a Tibetan Buddhist. All of these elements shaped my work today.”
So while her first painting lessons began at 14, as early as the 1970s, Abramović had declared her body as both object and subject, staging some of the most daring performances in contemporary art. In Rhythm 0 (1974), she laid out 72 objects on a table — including a knife, nails, scissors and gun — inviting audiences to use any on her. Over six hours, what began as a tentative interaction quickly turned hostile, as her clothes were ripped, skin cut and a loaded gun put to her head. The following year saw equally-charged works such as Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, where she furiously brushed her hair while repeating the title, in a biting commentary on expectations of beauty, and in Thomas Lips,a naked Abramović carved a five-pointed star on her stomach with a blade, pushing both her body and the audience on an edge.
The extremities of physical risk continued during her 12-year artistic and romantic partnership with German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen). One of performance art’s most formidable duos, their collaboration was fuelled as much by their unruly artistic chemistry as the improbable journeys they embarked after meeting in Amsterdam in 1975. Crisscrossing Europe in a Citroen van in the ’70s and ’80s, they also spent months in the Australian desert with the Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi tribe, and travelled through India to learn meditative practices from Tibetan monks and at Hindu ashrams. Along the way also came pioneering works, such as Relation in Time (1977) that saw the two agonisingly sitting back-to-back with their hair tied together for over 17 hours, and Rest Energy (1980), where an arrow held by Ulay was aimed at Abramović’s heart and she held the bow. Their partnership saw a symbolic closure with The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988) where, over 90 days, they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, met in the middle, embraced and parted ways.
Though Abramović has continued her unflinching acts, also receiving several prestigious awards and honours, more recent years have been marked by consolidation and reinvention, characterised by spiritual and introspective turns. “In the beginning of my journey with the body, I was interested in its physical limits. Then after that I started being more interested in the spiritual aspects of the body,” she says.
That shift is visible in works such as 7 Easy Pieces (2005), where she re-performed pieces of other artists, selecting those with little documentation— as an act of preservation and homage. “Everyone was copying early works of performance without giving any acknowledgement. If you take a piece of text from the book or copy music, you have to pay for the rights. With performance nobody cared and nobody paid for it. I think it’s so important to give performance dignity,” she says. Open to having all her works reperformed, except Rhythm 0 due to the dangers it entails, she adds, “It’s also very important who is performing this. It’s the same thing as playing piano. Mozart is Mozart but a player can be bad or good. We need people with the right charisma to perform these pieces,” she adds.
Abramović also feels responsible to document and share the history of the medium she has helped define. At KMB, this will be done through the MAI Archive and her performance lecture. “After my lecture, people in the audience who had never heard about performance art will have much more clarity on what performance is. It is time-based, emotional and immaterial,” says she.
In an era where every selfie, story and reel can be framed as an act of performance, does she see any connection with the questions artists like her have long explored? For Abramović, the two are worlds apart. “From my point of view, social media is social media and it has nothing to do with performance art. Performance art has nothing to do with social media,” she says.
