Yugoslav, 20th–21st century, female.
Active in the Netherlands.
Born 30 November 1946, in Belgrade (now in Serbia).
Performance artist. Multimedia.
Conceptual Art, Body Art.
Marina Abramović studied at the fine arts academy in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and began executing her first performance pieces, films, and videos between 1973 and 1976. She taught at the fine arts academy of Novi Sad from 1973 to 1975, the year she met Ulay in Amsterdam. They not only shared the same birth date but also the same artistic concerns. That meeting was described thus: ‘When we met for the first time in Amsterdam in 1975, we decided to meet up again on neutral territory, somewhere between Amsterdam and Belgrade. We chose Prague, which is exactly in the middle.’ From that time until the late 1980s, they lived and worked together. They describe their collaborative works as ‘relation-work’, a phrase that expresses their desire for total fusion....