Walk Through Walls

Marina Abramović grew up in postwar Communist Yugoslavia, the daughter of celebrated partisan war heroes. Her parents, Danica and Vojin, had saved each other's lives during World War II, but their marriage quickly deteriorated into constant fighting. Vojin was chronically unfaithful; Danica was rigidly controlling. As privileged members of the Communist Party, the family lived in a large Belgrade apartment, yet the household was emotionally desolate. Abramović's grandmother Milica raised her for the first six years of her life, and when she was returned to her parents at six, she found a home defined by violence and her mother's obsessive need for order. Danica and her sister regularly beat Marina, sometimes locking her in a dark closet. Her father never punished her and became her closest ally, but he left the family when she was 17. His departure triggered a mental health crisis that required medical intervention.

Despite this turbulence, Abramović knew from early childhood that she wanted to be an artist. Danica, for whom art was sacred, encouraged this one pursuit. A formative painting lesson from a family friend, in which pigment and gasoline were ignited on canvas, taught her that artistic process mattered more than the finished object. As a teenager, watching military jet trails dissolve across the sky, she realized art need not be confined to canvas. She entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she painted in an academic style while growing restless with two-dimensional work.

The political upheavals of 1968 radicalized her. She served as president of the Communist Party at the art academy and occupied the building alongside fellow students demanding reform. When the students accepted token concessions from Marshal Tito, she felt betrayed and burned her Party card. She formed a group of six artists determined to move beyond painting and put life itself into art, influenced by Western conceptual art, Arte Povera (an Italian movement using simple, everyday materials), and the anti-commercial Fluxus movement.

In 1971, she married fellow artist Neša Paripović, primarily to escape her mother's control, but Danica refused to let him sleep in the apartment, and they lived apart. The marriage was largely one of intellectual companionship and eventually dissolved. Abramović took a teaching position at the Novi Sad Academy, gaining freedom and income to pursue performance art. In the summer of 1975, she traveled to the Edinburgh Festival and performed Rhythm 10, a dangerous knife game in which she stabbed rapidly between her splayed fingers, recording blade strikes and groans, then replayed the tape and tried to replicate her accidents. The piece produced an unprecedented sense of unity with the audience. She had found her medium.

Over the next two years, she staged increasingly extreme solo performances. In Rhythm 5, she lay inside a flaming wooden star and lost consciousness from oxygen deprivation. In Rhythm 0 at Studio Morra in Naples, she placed 72 objects on a table, including a pistol and bullet, and invited the audience to use them on her for six hours. Strangers cut her clothes off, stuck pins in her, and cut her neck; one man loaded the pistol and pressed it to her throat before others intervened. In Thomas Lips at Krinzinger Gallery in Innsbruck, she cut a five-pointed star into her stomach with a razor, whipped herself, and lay on a cross of ice blocks until audience members pulled her off.

On her 29th birthday, an invitation arrived from the de Appel gallery in Amsterdam. There she met a German artist named Ulay, born Frank Uwe Laysiepen. They discovered they shared the same birthday, November 30, and fell passionately in love. Abramović soon left Belgrade for good, boarding a train to Amsterdam.

Together they created collaborative performances exploring the boundaries between two bodies and two selves. They sold their possessions, bought a used Citroën police van, and spent three years traveling across Europe, often desperately poor. Their works included Relation in Space, in which they ran naked toward each other with increasing force at the Venice Biennale; Imponderabilia, in which they stood nude in a narrowed museum doorway in Bologna, forcing each visitor to choose whom to face; and Breathing In, Breathing Out, in which they exchanged a single lungful of air mouth-to-mouth for 19 minutes until near-unconsciousness.

In 1980, they traveled to the Australian outback, spending months among the Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi Aboriginal peoples. The experience transformed Abramović's understanding of stillness and time. Inspired by the desert, they created Nightsea Crossing, a performance in which they sat motionless across a table from each other for eight hours daily, fasting and maintaining eye contact. They performed it 90 times over five years. Pushing through excruciating physical pain led Abramović to states she called "liquid knowledge." However, Ulay repeatedly left the table due to pain while Abramović stayed seated, believing the work's integrity took precedence. Her refusal to rise with him created a wound that festered.

Their relationship collapsed as Ulay had affairs and Abramović grew increasingly unhappy. They had conceived a grand plan to walk the Great Wall of China from opposite ends and marry when they met in the middle, but after eight years of negotiations with the Chinese government, they were no longer lovers. The walk took place in spring 1988. They met on June 27 at Erlang Shen, but Ulay had stopped at a scenic photo opportunity rather than walking toward her. His embrace was that of a comrade, not a lover. She learned he had impregnated his Chinese translator and flew back to Amsterdam alone.

Abramović rebuilt her life with fierce determination. She bought a wrecked, squatter-filled house in Amsterdam for 40,000 guilders by forming an alliance with the drug dealer squatting inside, and over 13 years transformed it into an elegant home. She began a 25-year teaching career, developing workshops based on endurance, fasting, and silence. She partnered with New York gallerist Sean Kelly, who became one of the most important professional figures in her life. Her father Vojin died in 2000; her mother Danica died in 2007. Among Danica's possessions, Marina discovered a hidden collection of press clippings about her career, a revelation that her mother's love had been real but inexpressible.

For the 1997 Venice Biennale, she created Balkan Baroque, a response to the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia after Tito's death. For four days she sat on a pile of 2,500 cow bones, scrubbing the bloody, maggot-infested remains while singing folk songs and weeping. The piece won the Golden Lion for best artist. At the Biennale she reconnected with Roman artist Paolo Canevari, whom she eventually married. But Paolo grew distant and left her, and she later discovered he had been involved with another woman. The heartbreak coincided with preparations for the biggest performance of her career.

The Artist Is Present, staged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from March to May 2010, consisted of Abramović sitting in a chair in the museum's atrium for 736 and a half hours over three months, maintaining silent eye contact with individual visitors. More than 1,500 people sat across from her; 850,000 stood in the atrium. Visitors wept, and she wept with them. On the first day, Ulay sat across from her, the only time she broke her rules to place her hands on his.

After The Artist Is Present, Abramović's public profile expanded dramatically. She founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), originally planned as a physical space in Hudson, New York, but reconceived as a nomadic organization bringing performance art to cultural institutions worldwide. In 2014, she created 512 Hours at London's Serpentine Galleries, guiding visitors through simple exercises after they surrendered their phones and watches. After years of relentless work brought her to the edge of physical collapse, she underwent a month-long Ayurvedic retreat in southern India. Emerging healed, she walked into the ocean and felt completely renewed.