The Conversation Series 23

Over the past three and a half decades, Marina Abramovic’s astonishing oeuvre, with pieces in which she performs feats of extreme endurance or mortification of the flesh, has laid bare--perhaps more than any other artist has done--the human body’s strengths, limitations, vulnerabilities and complex bouquet of meanings. In addition, her projects have simultaneously provoked and deflected intense curiosity about who could possibly want to publicly subject herself to such agonizing conditions: who, in short, is Marina Abramovic? In this revealing set of conversations--conducted in train stations, hotels, galleries and her own private studio--between Abramovic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, with the occasional addition of other interlocutors including Gustav Metzger (the “Old Master of action art”), the artist talks about her work, the strict discipline of her Yugoslav childhood and the process of preparing for her epochal retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.