It is Marina Abramović’s birthday today, so to celebrate we wrote a feature on her.
Few contemporary artists have so thoroughly reshaped the very idea of performance as Marina Abramović. For five decades, she has pushed the limits of endurance, intimacy, vulnerability, and the porous border between artist and audience. Her work is at once ascetic and theatrical, ritualistic and immediate — a confrontation with time, attention, and human presence.
Abramović emerged in the 1970s, part of a generation who saw the body not as a subject to be depicted, but as a material in itself. Her works — burning stars, bowed bows, knives, ice blocks, silence, stillness — belong to an artistic logic where the flesh becomes the canvas, the stage, the question, and the answer. What distinguishes Abramović is her persistent belief that art is not merely shown but experienced; that transformation requires risk; and that the audience is not passive but implicated.
At the centre of her practice lies a near-spiritual commitment to vulnerability. Again and again, she asks: What remains when everything extraneous is stripped away? What do we find at the edge of endurance? And what does it take to be fully, dangerously present?
Marina & Ulay: A Relationship Performed Into Being
One cannot speak about Abramović without speaking about Ulay — her collaborator, partner, mirror, and counterpoint from 1976 to 1988. Their twelve-year partnership is one of the most iconic in performance art, a living dialogue between masculine and feminine energies, between duality and unity, between self and other.
Together, Abramović and Ulay created a body of work that operated on a knife’s edge — emotionally, physically, conceptually. Their performances were not representations of intimacy; they were intimacy. They were not depictions of trust but acts of trust, in real time, in front of an audience that witnessed both devotion and risk.
Key Works & Themes
• Relation in Space (1976)
Abramović and Ulay ran toward one another at full speed, colliding again and again. Repetition transformed impact into choreography — the line between aggression and tenderness dissolving.
• Breathing In / Breathing Out (1977)
Locked mouth to mouth, they exchanged only each other’s breath until they collapsed. Their bodies became a closed system, sustaining and suffocating one another in a single act.
• Imponderabilia (1977)
Naked, they stood on either side of a narrow museum doorway, forcing visitors to squeeze between them — choosing, consciously or not, whom they faced. Audience members became active participants in the negotiation of space, gaze, and vulnerability.
• Rest Energy (1980)
Ulay held a bow, Abramović held the arrow pointed at her heart. Micro-movements, breaths, and tremors became part of the tension. Their relationship — literal and symbolic — hung on a single thread.
Their practice was built on extremes: mutual dependence, mirrored identity, erotic neutrality, and profound emotional exposure. They sought to become, in Abramović’s words, “a two-headed body.”
The Great Ending: The Lovers (1988)
After twelve years of working as one artistic organism, the pair separated in a performance that has since become mythic. For The Lovers, Abramović and Ulay began at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and walked for ninety days toward each other — only to meet in the middle, embrace, and say goodbye.
It was an ending written as epic travel, ritual endurance, and public heartbreak.
A relationship that had unfolded before audiences ended before them too — not as spectacle, but as a final act of truth.
Beyond Ulay: The Artist Alone
While the partnership with Ulay defined a formative chapter, Abramović’s later career — from Balkan Baroque to The Artist is Present — has carried her inquiry into new registers of vulnerability and attention. She has become, more than any other contemporary performer, the emblem of endurance art: an artist willing to confront pain, silence, exhaustion, and the gaze of strangers in order to strip art down to its essence.
Her legacy lies not only in the works themselves but in the expectation she created: that performance can be a site of communion, that presence is an act of generosity, and that the body — fragile, flawed, mortal — is a powerful instrument for truth.
My World of Interiors 