Marina Abramović, born in 1946 in Belgrade, is a pioneer of performance art. Since the early 70ies, she has been continuously pushing herself to her physical and mental limit in performances that lasted for hours and even days, challenging herself but also the audience with her often shocking pieces. Her body has always been both subject and instrument in her art productions that spanned performance, photography, video or sound installations.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York showed a retrospective of her work this Spring. 'Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present' also included re-performances of her work by other people. For this exhibition, Marina Abramović showed a new piece of work, a 700-hours performance, the longest performance art sequence ever shown. She invited museum visitors to participate in her art project by sitting down on a chair in front of her for an indeterminate amount of time in silence. Every morning during several weeks she came to sit down on her chair and only left it again at the museum's closing time. I got the chance to visit the last day of the exhibition and was deeply impressed by her work.
