Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic is a New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over four decades, her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

Abramovic was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2008, she was decorated with the Austrian Commander Cross for her contribution to art history.

In 2010, Abramovic had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for 716 hours in “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this performance, Abramovic engaged in mutual gaze with more than one thousand strangers over the course of three months. Over 750,000 visitors came to see “The Artist Is Present” and Abramovic was inspired by the general public’s desire to engage with immaterial works. This is when her vision of MAI was born.