MARINA ABRAMOVIC. The Art of Presence

Listening to Marina Abramović means sensing the arc of a life that continually expands beyond its own boundaries. For the shy girl growing up in communist Tito-era Yugoslavia, everything changes when she discovers her own body as an artistic medium and the audience as a resonant space for an unknown, electrifying force. This awakens a passion whose pull she will never escape throughout her artistic life.

From these first steps emerges, already at a young age, an artist who has always wrestled with uncertainty, risk, and radical openness. What she calls “heroic” is not pathos, but her actual, wholehearted courage to use a then-nearly unknown art form to turn the body into a canvas, an instrument, a battlefield, and a mirror for her audience.

Performance is unique not only because it requires the audience’s presence to bear witness; it is unique because it is sustained by presence in a far deeper sense. One must be there—present in one’s entirety, excluding nothing—only then can a truthfulness arise in which something shifts credibly, slowly, irrevocably, on both sides. This is why Abramović established duration as a central element of her performance art. Over long stretches of time, one cannot pretend; duration drags into the light everything that prefers to remain hidden, and her performance not only reveals it but makes it workable.

Her work moves from body to mind, from testing physical limits to exploring the infinite inner space. And although the radicality of her early performances may sometimes overshadow it, a deeper aim becomes increasingly visible: elevating the human spirit. Abramović speaks of hope not as consolation, but as necessity: “The spirit in any condition does not burn.”

Our interview film traces the evolution of her work, her thoughts, and her being. In her case, these three levels are interwoven—they act upon and influence one another. We follow her through the symbiotic intensity of the years with Ulay, through times of solitude and silence, and it becomes clear how new artistic direction emerges from the events of life. Transformation is a guiding motif: her own, that of the audience, and that of the art form itself.

Anyone who follows the interview and knows her work may be surprised to encounter someone whose seriousness is met equally by lightness. Everything unnecessary, she says, has been cut away. What remains is joy, honesty, and humor—the necessary laughter that first unsettles what is preconceived.

This film invites us to share in this growing clarity. It is not a biography, but an encounter with a spirit that continually recreates itself; not a chronology, but a meditation on what it means to live art as a form of courage, connection, and transformation. Marina Abramović is both guide and mirror: “If I can do this with myself, then I am your tool—you can do it too.”

The exhibition “Marina Abramović” at the Albertina Modern is on view until March 1, 2026.

https://www.albertina.at

Interviewee: Marina Abramović
Artworks by: Marina Abramović

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): English
Subtitles: German
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Michael Rottmann
Production country: Austria, Vienna