Marina Abramovic

(Belgrade, 1946)

A pioneering performance artist, her body is the subject and medium of her work, exploring the physical and spiritual limits of her being. Create ritualizing everyday actions. From 1975 to 1988, Abramovic and the German artist Ulay performed together, addressing relationships of duality and exploring the concepts of ego and artistic identity, the traditions of their respective cultural heritages, and the individual's desire for ritual. After breaking up in 1988, Abramovic returned to solo performances. He has presented his work at major institutions, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris (1990), Neue National Galerie, Berlin (1993) and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1995) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977). , 1982 and 1992). In 1997 she presented the piece Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale, for which she received the Golden Lion for best artist. In 2005 he presented Seven Easy Pieces at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). In 2010, a major retrospective of his work opened at the MoMa in New York. In 2011 he premiered Life and Death of Marina Abramović, edited by Robert Wilson, a cross between theatre, opera and visual art. In 2020 she premiered Seven Deaths of Maria Callas, an operatic production around the figure of the diva. Abramovic founded the Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), a long-term, immaterial work platform to create new possibilities for collaboration between thinkers from all fields.

The video installation The onion (1998) participates in Medialab Madrid. This work reflects on the meaning of resignation and suffering. The ingestion of a raw onion, understood as a metaphor for life, unleashes a series of repressed feelings that speak of the fatigue of enduring social conventions, of enduring long waits and loneliness, of suffering failed loves, shame and headaches. But it also speaks of the desire to be far away and untraceable, to be so old that nothing matters anymore, to clearly understand what is hidden behind things, to stop being subject to feelings.