11 Things You Didn’t Know About Marina Abramovic

Abhishek Kumar

Knowledge can be gained at any age. After having a detailed study on topics there are things unknown to us. So, we at Abirpothi present before you the lesser-known facts about artists around the world.

Marina Abramovic

“Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality. What I was doing in Rhythm 0—as in all my other performances—was staging these fears for the audience: using their energy to push my body as far as possible. In the process, I liberated myself from my fears. And as this happened, I became a mirror for the audience—if I could do it, they could do it too.”

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance artist who has been active for over five decades. She is widely considered one of the most important and influential artists in the field of performance art. Her works often explore themes of identity, power, and the body, and she has used her own body as a medium in many of her performances. Some of her most famous works include “The Artist is Present,” in which she sat motionless in front of museum visitors for hours on end, and “Rhythm 0,” in which she invited audience members to use objects on her body as they saw fit. Abramović’s work challenges the boundaries of art and invites viewers to question their own perceptions and assumptions.

Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1946 and began her career as a performance artist in the 1970s. Her early works often involved physically and mentally challenging herself, pushing the limits of her own body and endurance. Over time, her work has evolved to encompass a wide range of media and techniques, but she remains best known for her performance art pieces.

Throughout her career, Marina Abramovic has been a leader in the development of performance as a visual art form, creating some of the most significant early instances of the discipline. These include Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she exposed herself to the audience as a subject of experimentation, and Rhythm 5 (1974), in which she lay until she lost consciousness in the centre of a flaming five-point star. Concept and physicality, endurance and empathy, cooperation and loss of control, and passivity and danger were all combined in these performances.

In addition to her performance work, Abramović is also a teacher and a writer. She has taught workshops and classes on performance art and has written several books on her life and work. She has also collaborated with a number of other artists and musicians, including Ulay, with whom she had a romantic and artistic relationship for several years.

11 lesser-known facts about Marina Abramovic

1. Marina Abramovic accused Jay Z of failing to make a promised donation to her performance art institute after she appeared in a music video for his song “Picasso Baby.”

   

2. Marina Abramovic performed The Artist is Present, sitting eight hours a day for three months in 2010.
3. When she was younger, she tried to break her nose to force her parents to pay for plastic surgery.
4. In 1997, she performed a piece called Balkan Baroque, where she scrubbed 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day.
5. In 2005, Marina Abramovic recreated Vito Acconci’s 1972 piece Seedbed at the Guggenheim as an ode to performance art of the past, claiming to have had nine loud orgasms during the piece.
6. She played Russian Roulette with her mother’s pistol when she was 14 years old.

   

7. In her exhibition Rhythm 0 (1973), she stood immobile in a room for 6 hours along with 72 objects, ranging from a rose, to whips, mousetraps and a loaded gun. The audience was invited to use these objects on her however they wished and she apparently still has scars to this day.
8. In 2023 Abramovic will be the first female artist to hold a major solo exhibition in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
9. Abramovic and Ulay sat motionlessly back to back with their hair tied together over a period of 17 hours. On another occasion, they screamed into each other’s open mouths until they were hoarse. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the couple became known for rejecting convention.
10. She had a hard time getting the rights to perform Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.
11. Marina Abramovic’s first verified exhibition was IX BIENNALE DE PARIS at Biennale de Paris in Paris in 1975, and the most recent exhibition was Winter is coming at Wilde in Geneva in 2022.