Marina Abramo Research Paper

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Yugoslavia to two military parents with close ties to the communist regime. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, initially wanting to be a painter, but, wanting to explore the creation of art without material objects, she eventually decided to focus on performance art. She has often used her body as her subject and medium throughout her career, testing the limits of the human body’s endurance and putting herself in extreme pain, exhaustion, and danger. In her 1974 piece Rhythm 5, she set a large star in the middle of the floor on fire; cut her nails and hair, threw them in the fire, then jumped into the middle of the star herself. She lost consciousness from lack of oxygen and had to be removed by audience members. 1974’s Rhythm 2 consisted of Marina sitting in a chair, first taking a pill prescribed for catatonia that caused her to seize, then, after the effects had worn off, taking a pill prescribed for depression that resulted in complete immobility. In 1975’s Lips of Thomas, she cut a star on her stomach out of a razor blade, then whipped herself. In her early works, she discovered that through harming herself, she could use the energy of the audience to drive her performance. …show more content…
Among their most famous works together are Rest Energy (1980) in which the two of them balanced on opposite sides of a bow and arrow, the arrow pointing toward Marina’s heart; Imponderabilia (1977), in which they stood facing each other, nude, in a narrow doorway, forcing people to squeeze through them, and Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977), in which they connected their mouths, breathing in each other’s oxygen, eventually both passing