Marina Abramovic, (born in 1946 in Belgrade) is a Yugoslavian-born performance artist naturalized American.
She was born in a family who held important roles in the history of the ‘900 – who received great recognition.
Her parents, in fact, were partisans during World War II; the father was recognized as a national hero, and the mother was given the direction of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade, in the mid 60s.
Marina Abramovic is considered one of the pioneer of the performance art and her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.
She took an interest in art since her young age and attended the Academy of Fine art in Belgrade.
In those years she started her first performances in Italy, and in particular in Milan at the Diagramma Gallery of Luciano Inga Pin she presented her performance Rhytm 4. In 1976 she moved to Amsterdam where she met Ulay, German artist with which she started an important collaboration.
She participated to a large number of solo and collective shows and was an award winner of many prizes all around the world among which the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale in 1997 with the performance Balkan Baroque one of the works that aimed to denounce the war in the Balkan: Others Where The Hero, Count on us, Nude with Skeleton, Balkan Erotic Epic.
Among her most famous performance there are Seven Easy Pieces (2005) presented at the Guggenheim Museum of New York, The Artist Is Present (March-May 2010) at MoMA of New York, and in collaboration with Ulay The Great Wall Walk when they walked the Great Wall of China, Relation in Movement and Imponderabilia (1977 and reenacted in 2010).
She participated to B#Side War vol II in occasion of the female video artist and the way video-art-day event Contemporary Legacies of the Conflicts and the Role of Women in preserving our common Memory with her video Dangerous Games.
