Rhythm 10, 1973 In her first performance in Edinburgh in 1973, Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of ten knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the
Knife game, in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one's hand, the title of the piece getting its name from the number of knives used. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of ten she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself ten times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing; the double sounds from the history and the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. "Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do."
Rhythm 5, 1974 In this performance, Abramović sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme bodily pain, using a large petroleum-drenched pentagram, which the artist lit on fire at the start of the performance. Standing outside the pentagram, Abramović cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the pentagram represented a physical and mental purification, while also addressing the political traditions of her past. In the final act of purification, Abramović leapt across the flames into the center of the large pentagram. At first, due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience did not realize that the artist had lost consciousness from lack of oxygen inside the star. However, when the flames came very near to her body and she still remained inert, a doctor and others intervened and extricated her from the star. Abramović later commented upon this experience: "I was very angry because I understood there is a physical limit. When you lose consciousness you can't be present, you can't perform."
Rhythm 2, 1974 Prompted by her loss of consciousness during
Rhythm 5, Abramović devised the two-part
Rhythm 2 to incorporate a state of unconsciousness in a performance. She performed the work at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, in 1974. In Part I, which had a duration of 50 minutes, she ingested a medication she describes as 'given to patients who suffer from
catatonia, to force them to change the positions of their bodies.' The medication caused her muscles to contract violently, and she lost complete control over her body while remaining aware of what was going on. After a ten-minute break, she took a second medication 'given to schizophrenic patients with violent behavior disorders to calm them down.' The performance ended after five hours when the medication wore off.
Rhythm 4, 1974 Rhythm 4 was performed at the Galleria Diagramma in Milan. In this piece, Abramović knelt alone and naked in a room with a high-power industrial fan. She approached the fan slowly, attempting to breathe in as much air as possible to push the limits of her lungs. Soon after she lost consciousness. Abramović's previous experience in
Rhythm 5, when the audience interfered in the performance, led to her devising specific plans so that her loss of consciousness would not interrupt the performance before it was complete. Before the beginning of her performance, Abramović asked the cameraman to focus only on her face, disregarding the fan. This was so the audience would be oblivious to her unconscious state, and therefore be unlikely to interfere. After several minutes of Abramović's unconsciousness, the cameraman refused to continue and sent for help. In her works, Abramović defines her identity in contradiction to that of spectators; however, more importantly, by blurring the roles of each party, the identity and nature of humans individually and collectively also become less clear. By doing so, the individual experience morphs into a collective one and truths are revealed. This was the beginning of a decade of influential collaborative work. Each performer was interested in the traditions of their cultural heritage and the individual's desire for ritual. Consequently, they decided to form a collective being called "The Other", and spoke of themselves as parts of a "two-headed body". They dressed and behaved like twins and created a relationship of complete trust. As they defined this phantom identity, their individual identities became less defined. In an analysis of phantom artistic identities, Charles Green has noted that this allowed a deeper understanding of the artist as performer, since it revealed a way of "having the artistic self made available for self-scrutiny". The work of Abramović and Ulay tested the physical limits of the body and explored male and female principles, psychic energy,
transcendental meditation, and
nonverbal communication. • In
Relation in Space (1976) they ran into each other repeatedly for an hour – mixing male and female energy into the third component called "that self". • To create
Breathing In/Breathing Out the two artists devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other's exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Nineteen minutes after the beginning of the performance they pulled away from each other, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it. • In
Imponderabilia (1977, reenacted in 2010) two performers of opposite sexes, both completely nude, stand in a narrow doorway. The public must squeeze between them in order to pass, and in doing so choose which one of them to face. Between 1981 and 1987, the pair performed
Nightsea Crossing in twenty-two
performances. They sat silently across from each other in chairs for seven hours a day. She has said that she conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy, and attraction. She later described the process: "We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending ... Because in the end, you are really alone, whatever you do." Abramović had a deeply emotional reaction to Ulay when he arrived at her performance, reaching out to him across the table between them; the video of the event went viral. In November 2015, Ulay took Abramović to court, claiming she had paid him insufficient royalties according to the terms of a 1999 contract covering sales of their joint works and a year later, in September 2016, Abramović was ordered to pay Ulay €250,000. In its ruling, the court in Amsterdam found that Ulay was entitled to royalties of 20% net on the sales of their works, as specified in the original 1999 contract, and ordered Abramović to backdate royalties of more than €250,000, as well as more than €23,000 in legal costs. Additionally, she was ordered to credit all works created between 1976 and 1980 as "Ulay/Abramović" and all works created between 1981 and 1988 as "Abramović/Ulay". Ulay died in March 2020, after a recurrence of lymphatic cancer.
Cleaning the Mirror, 1995 , New York, 2010
Cleaning the Mirror consisted of five monitors playing footage in which Abramović scrubs a grimy human skeleton in her lap. She vigorously brushes the different parts of the skeleton with soapy water. Each monitor is dedicated to one part of the skeleton: the head, the pelvis, the ribs, the hands, and the feet. Each video is filmed with its own sound, creating an overlap. As the skeleton becomes cleaner, Abramović becomes covered in the grayish dirt that was once covering the skeleton. This three-hour performance is filled with metaphors of the Tibetan death rites that prepare disciples to become one with their own mortality. The piece was composed of three parts.
Cleaning the Mirror #1, lasting three hours, was performed at the
Museum of Modern Art.
Cleaning the Mirror #2 lasts 90 minutes and was performed at Oxford University.
Cleaning the Mirror #3 was performed at
Pitt Rivers Museum over five hours.
Spirit Cooking, 1996 Abramović worked with Jacob Samuel to produce a cookbook of "aphrodisiac recipes" called
Spirit Cooking in 1996. These "recipes" were meant to be "evocative instructions for actions or for thoughts". For example, one of the recipes calls for "13,000 grams of jealousy", while another says to "mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk." The work was inspired by the popular belief that ghosts feed off intangible things like light, sound, and emotions. In 1997, Abramović created a multimedia
Spirit Cooking installation. This was originally installed in the Zerynthia Associazione per l'Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy, and included white gallery walls with "enigmatically violent recipe instructions" painted in pig's blood. According to Alexxa Gotthardt, the work is "a comment on humanity's reliance on ritual to organize and legitimize our lives and contain our bodies". Abramović also published a
Spirit Cooking cookbook, containing comico-mystical, self-help instructions that are meant to be poetry.
Spirit Cooking later evolved into a form of dinner party entertainment that Abramović occasionally lays on for collectors, donors, and friends.
Balkan Baroque, 1997 In this piece, Abramović vigorously scrubbed thousands of bloody cow bones over a period of four days, a reference to the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in the Balkans during the 1990s. This performance piece earned Abramović the Golden Lion award at the
Venice Biennale. Abramović created
Balkan Baroque as a response to the
Yugoslav Wars. She remembers other artists reacting immediately, creating work and protesting about the effects and horrors of the war. Abramović could not bring herself to create work on the matter so soon, as it hit too close to home for her. Eventually, Abramović returned to Belgrade, where she interviewed her mother, her father, and a
rat-catcher. She then incorporated these interviews into her piece, as well as clips of the hands of her father holding a pistol and her mother's empty hands and later, her crossed hands. Abramović is dressed as a doctor recounting the story of the rat-catcher. While the clips are playing, Abramović sits among a large pile of bones and tries to wash them. The performance occurred in Venice in 1997. Abramović remembered the horrible smell – for it was extremely hot in Venice that summer – and that worms emerged from the bones. She has explained that the idea of scrubbing the bones clean and trying to remove the blood, is impossible. The point Abramović was trying to make is that blood can't be washed from bones and hands, just as the war couldn't be cleansed of shame. She wanted to allow the images from the performance to speak for not only the war in Bosnia, but for any war, anywhere in the world. All seven performances were dedicated to Abramović's late friend
Susan Sontag. A full list of the works performed is as follows: •
Bruce Nauman's
Body Pressure (1974) •
Vito Acconci's
Seedbed (1972) •
Valie Export's
Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) •
Gina Pane's
The Conditioning (1973) •
Joseph Beuys's
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) • Abramović's own
Thomas Lips (1975) • Abramović's own
Entering the Other Side (2005)
The Artist Is Present: March–May 2010 , March 2010 From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the
Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history, curated by
Klaus Biesenbach. Biesenbach also provided the title for the performance, which referred to the fact that during the entire performance "the artist would be
right there in the gallery or the museum." During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed
The Artist Is Present, a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. Ulay made a surprise appearance at the opening night of the show. Abramović sat in a rectangle marked with tape on the floor of the second floor atrium of the MoMA; theater lights shone on her sitting in a chair and a chair opposite her. Visitors waiting in line were invited to sit individually across from the artist while she maintained
eye contact with them. Visitors began crowding the atrium within days of the show opening, some gathering before the exhibit opened each morning to get a better place in line. Most visitors sat with the artist for five minutes or less, while a few sat with her for an entire day. The line attracted no attention from museum security until the last day of the exhibition, when a visitor vomited in line and
another began to disrobe. Tensions among visitors in line could have arisen from the realization that the longer the earlier visitors spent with Abramović, the less chance that those further back in line would be able to sit with her. Due to the strenuous nature of sitting for hours at a time, art-enthusiasts have wondered whether Abramović wore an adult diaper in order to eliminate the need for bathroom breaks. Others have highlighted the movements she made in between sitters as a focus of analysis, as the only variations in the artist between sitters were when she would cry if a sitter cried and her moment of physical contact with Ulay, one of the earliest visitors to the exhibition. Abramović sat across from 1,545 sitters, including
Klaus Biesenbach,
James Franco,
Lou Reed,
Alan Rickman,
Jemima Kirke,
Jennifer Carpenter, and
Björk; sitters were asked not to touch or speak to her. By the end of the exhibit, hundreds of visitors were lining up outside the museum overnight to secure a spot in line the next morning. Abramović concluded the performance by slipping from the chair where she was seated and rising to a cheering crowd more than ten people deep. A support group for the "sitters", "Sitting with Marina", was established on Facebook, as was the blog "Marina Abramović made me cry". The Italian photographer
Marco Anelli took portraits of every person who sat opposite Abramović, which were published on Flickr, compiled in a book and featured in an exhibition at the Danziger Gallery in New York. Abramović said the show changed her life "completely – every possible element, every physical emotion". After
Lady Gaga saw the show and publicized it, Abramović found a new audience: "So the kids from 12 and 14 years old to about 18, the public who normally don't go to the museum, who don't give a shit about performance art or don't even know what it is, started coming because of Lady Gaga. And they saw the show and then they started coming back. And that's how I get a whole new audience." In September 2011, a video game version of Abramović's performance was released by Pippin Barr. In 2013, Dale Eisinger of
Complex ranked
The Artist Is Present ninth (along with
Rhythm 0) in his list of the greatest performance art works. Her performance inspired Australian novelist
Heather Rose to write
The Museum of Modern Love and she subsequently launched the US edition of the book at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018.
Balkan Erotic Epic: October 2025 Balkan Erotic Epic was a durational performance artwork by
Marina Abramović, presented at
Factory International's Aviva Studios in Manchester from 9 to 19 October 2025. Building on Abramović’s 2005 multi-channel video installation of the same name, the four-hour performance explored
Balkan folklore, collective mythology, ancient myths, ritual, eroticism, spirituality and tradition.
Frieze called the performance "a reclamation, reinvention and perversion of personal and collective history, mythology and identity." The performance is touring in Barcelona (24-30 January 2026), Berlin (14-17 October 2026) and New York (8-20 December 2026). Abramović is also the subject of an independent documentary film entitled
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, which is based on her life and performance at her retrospective "The Artist Is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. The film was broadcast in the United States on
HBO and won a
Peabody Award in 2012. In January 2011, Abramović was on the cover of Serbian
ELLE, photographed by Dušan Reljin.
Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction novel
2312 mentions a style of performance art pieces known as "abramovics". A world premiere installation by Abramović was featured at Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods Park as part of the
Luminato Festival in June 2013. Abramović is also co-creator, along with
Robert Wilson of the theatrical production
The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, which had its North American premiere at the festival, and at the
Park Avenue Armory in December. In 2007 Abramović created the
Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a nonprofit foundation for performance art, in a 33,000 square-foot space in
Hudson, New York. She also founded a performance institute in San Francisco. In June 2014 she presented a new piece at London's
Serpentine Gallery called
512 Hours. In the
Sean Kelly Gallery-hosted
Generator, (December 6, 2014) participants are blindfolded and wear
noise-canceling headphones in an exploration of nothingness. In celebration of her 70th birthday on November 30, 2016, Abramović took over the Guggenheim museum (eleven years after her previous installation there) for her birthday party entitled "Marina 70". Part one of the evening, titled "Silence," lasted 70 minutes, ending with the crash of a gong struck by the artist. Then came the more conventional part two: "Entertainment", during which Abramović took to the stage to make a speech before watching English singer and visual artist
ANOHNI perform the song "
My Way" while wearing a large black hood. In March 2015, Abramović presented a
TED talk titled, "An art made of trust, vulnerability and connection". In 2019,
IFC's
mockumentary show
Documentary Now! parodied Abramović's work and the documentary film
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. The show's episode, entitled "Waiting for the Artist", starred
Cate Blanchett as Isabella Barta (Abramović) and
Fred Armisen as Dimo (Ulay). Originally set to open on September 26, 2020, her first major exhibition in the UK at the Royal Academy of Arts was rescheduled for autumn 2021 due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Academy, the exhibition would "bring together works spanning her 50-year career, along with new works conceived especially for these galleries. As Abramović approaches her mid-70s, her new work reflects on changes to the artist's body and explores her perception of the transition between life and death." On reviewing this exhibition Tabish Khan, writing for Culture Whisper, described it thus: “It’s intense, it’s discomfiting, it’s memorable, and it’s performance art at its finest". In 2021, she dedicated a monument, entitled,
Crystal wall of crying, at the site of a Holocaust massacre in
Ukraine and which is memorialized through the
Babi Yar memorials. In 2022, she condemned the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. In September 2023, Abramović became the first woman to have a solo exhibition in the
Royal Academy’s main galleries; the show, which she helped stage while recovering from a near-fatal pulmonary embolism, explored how her performance works might be reinterpreted or reperformed by others, testing the endurance of her legacy through archival footage, installations, and live performances by artists trained in the Marina Abramović Method. In 2024, Abramović returned to
China for her first-ever museum show in the country at
Shanghai’s Modern Art Museum (MAM). Her last visit to the country was in 1988, when she performed three-month walk along the
Great Wall of China. In 2026, she is planned to have a solo exhibition titled Transforming Energy at Venice's
Gallerie dell'Accademia art biennale. It will be the first exhibition for a living female artist in the museum's 275-year history.
Unfulfilled proposals Abramović had proposed some solo performances during her career that never were performed. One such proposal was titled "Come to Wash with Me". This performance would take place in a gallery space that was to be transformed into a laundry with sinks placed all around the walls of the gallery. The public would enter the space and be asked to take off all of their clothes and give them to Abramović. The individuals would then wait around as she would wash, dry and iron their clothes for them, and once she was done, she would give them back their clothing, and they could get dressed and then leave. She proposed this in 1969 for the Galerija Doma Omladine in Belgrade. The proposal was refused. In 1970 she proposed a similar idea to the same gallery that was also refused. The piece was untitled. Abramović would stand in front of the public dressed in her regular clothing. Present on the side of the stage was a clothes rack adorned with clothing that her mother wanted her to wear (including oversized items such as a bra or a slip). She would take the clothing one by one and change into them, then stand to face the public for a while. "From the right pocket of my skirt I take a gun. From the left pocket of my skirt I take a bullet. I put the bullet into the chamber and turn it. I place the gun to my temple. I pull the trigger." The performance had two possible outcomes. One of them is that Abramović dies as a result of shooting herself. ==Films==