About Marina Abramović
Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form's most important early works. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.
Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2010, Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Abramović founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.
Abramović published her memoir, Walk Through Walls, with Crown Archetype on October 25, 2016. Her most recent publication is A Visual Biography, was published by Laurence King in 2023.
Her retrospective The Cleaner opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in February 2017 and toured to seven additional European venues, ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia in 2019. In September 2020, the Bayerische Staats Oper presented the world premiere of Marina’s opera project 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which has continued to tour to various cities across Europe. In September 2023, she opened her solo exhibition at the Royal Academy, and became the first female artist in the institution’s 250-year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work.
About Moderator Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer is the author of 16 books, translated into 23 languages, and dealing with subjects ranging from the XIVth Dalai Lama to Islamic mysticism and from globalism to the Cuban Revolution. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and The Art of Stillness. His latest, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, has been a national bestseller, and he’s just completing his next work, on his first 32 years with a community of Benedictine monks in Big Sur. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, the liner notes for many Leonard Cohen albums and Criterion Collection movies and a screenplay for Miramax. Since 1986 he has been a regular essayist for Time, The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and many others.
His four TED talks have received more than 11 million views, and he has been featured in program-length interviews with Oprah, Krista Tippett and Larry King, among others. Born in Oxford, England in 1957, Iyer was a King’s Scholar at Eton and was awarded a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford, where he received the highest marks of any student on English Literature at the university. He received a second master’s degree at Harvard and was recently a Ferris Professor at Princeton.