Marina Abramović: Interview to Tim Adams: art, pain, authority and her performance at the at the Royal Academy, London, 23 September-1 January;

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  • Marina Abramović (November 30, 1946), becomes the first woman to have a full Royal Academy retrospective.  

  •  She has spent a good deal of the past 50 years inflicting pain and stress on her body in the name of art. 

  •  She has an institution in New York that teaches the "Abramović Method" to aspiring performance artists, a mix of mindfulness and consciousness-raising techniques, designed to unleash determination and creativity. 

  •  Abramović grew up in communist Belgrade. 

  •  She was born in 1946, the daughter of parents who had both been famous partisan fighters in Marshal Tito's army during the war. Some of her character was formed by her formidably strict mother. 


  •  "[My mother] wanted to make me a warrior, so I would not suffer as she did. [...] She never kissed me in my life". 

  •  In her teenage years, she started to rebel against [the] structures of home and church, and against the oppressive state. "I was against everyone: my family, my professors, the government".  

  •  A turning point for her in her journey [as narrated in her book released this September, "Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places"] was her contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1997.  

  •  Balkan Baroque was a response to the horrors of war and ethnic conflict in her native Yugoslavia. She sat for days on the top of a huge pile of bloody cow bones in a white dress, and tried and failed to scrub them clean of blood. 


 


  • "It was a protest against war that was dedicated to what was happening in Yugoslavia", she says now, "but it is an image you could use in Afganistan, you could use in Iraq, or right now in Ukraine." 

  • "I nearly died for love-which is why I made this piece about Maria Callas, because she literally died for that bastard, Onassis. I my case, the work saved me." 

  •  "Our mind fucks up all the time because it is always overthinking. [...] Our bodies are wiser". 


 


All information is taken from the Guardian, September 17, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/17/marina-abramovic-royal-academy-exhibition-south-bank-centre-nomadic-journey-interview 

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