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Marina Abramović is one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century. Since her early seventies work in Yugoslavia, she has fundamentally reshaped the medium: the body is always both her subject and her material. She explores the physical and mental limits of endurance, using pain, exhaustion and ritual as means of emotional and spiritual transformation. Simple actions like sitting, lying down and breathing become charged with an intensity that hits the viewer directly.

From 1976 to 1988 she collaborated with the German artist Ulay in a series of performances centred on duality, physical symmetry and mutual dependency. After their separation she returned to solo work, and her attention shifted increasingly towards the relationship between artist and audience. That shift reached its apex in The Artist Is Present (MoMA, 2010), in which she sat motionless opposite a continuous stream of visitors for months on end. The work cannot exist without the presence of another person, and that principle runs through her entire practice.