Marina Abramović (Serbian, b. 1946) is a conceptual and performance artist whose work explores body art, endurance, and the relationship between performer and audience. Active since the early 1970s, she has described herself as “the grandmother of performance art”. In 2007 she founded the Marina Abramović Institute, a non-profit foundation dedicated to performance art.
In Rhythm 0, staged in Naples in 1974, she stood passively for six hours while inviting the audience to use any of 72 objects on her body, including a rose, a whip, and a loaded gun, testing how far people would go when freed of consequences. From 1976 to 1988 she lived and performed with Ulay, creating collaborative performances known as relation works, centered on movement, ego, and artistic identity.In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art staged her retrospective “The Artist Is Present”, in which she sat silently across from museum visitors for hundreds of hours while other performers re-enacted earlier pieces including Imponderabilia throughout the museum.
In 2022 Abramović released her first NFT, The Hero 25FPS, in collaboration with the CIRCA screen network on the Tezos blockchain, using proceeds to fund Hero Grants supporting new ideas from people working in Web3.The work premiered at Art Basel in June 2022, where she discussed the significance of Web3 communities with CIRCA artistic director Josef O'Connor.She compared the skepticism Web3 artists faced to the dismissal performance art received in the 1970s, saying “the older generation of artists likes to ridicule these Web3 artists and likes to think that this is nonsense, this is just bullshit, and so on. The same happened to me in the 1970s”.For her 80th birthday in 2026, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice presented “Transforming Energy”, pairing her work with Renaissance paintings and including an AI-avatar installation of six moving-image works produced with TAEX.,In 2025 she received the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture from the Japan Art Association, an annual prize honoring artists with major international impact.
