Marina Abramović prides herself on being punctual— after all, she is a woman who has made a career out of time as an artistic medium. So, when she still hasn’t appeared, 20 minutes after our interview was due to start, I begin to wonder if there has been a mix-up over the venue, a new super-luxe hotel in the heart of Mayfair teaming with slightly nervous front-of-house staff. Seconds later, Abramović glides into the hotel lobby, chicly but comfortably dressed head-to-toe in black, and ushers me into a lift. “I thought we were meeting in my room!” she exclaims warmly. “I’m never late, I’m from a communist country! You must have thought I was being a diva.”
If not a diva, then Serbian-born Abramović — who will be 80 next year — is certainly a grand dame. In 2023, she became the first woman to have a solo show at the Royal Academy and next year, during the Venice Biennale, she will be the first living woman to have an exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. Her epic performances have ranged from spending 90 days walking the Great Wall of China to end her relationship with German artist Ulay, her long-time collaborator and partner, to spending six hours allowing an audience to use chains, lipstick and knives on her body. At one point a loaded gun was held to her head. “I just wanted to know if the public could kill you,” she says. “The answer is yes.”
At Glastonbury Festival last summer, she persuaded up to 200,000 people waiting for PJ Harvey to play on the Pyramid Stage to remain silent for seven minutes in the name of world peace. “I was terrified. I mean, people had been drinking since the morning. Taking mushrooms. I was expecting somebody to scream or a child to cry, but it went silent. A miracle happened.” During Frieze Week, Abramović has another prime slot: at Saatchi Yates gallery on Bury Street, in the heart of London’s commercial art scene. It is a one-off show, of 1,200 photographic stills taken from two videos by the artist: Red Period and Blue Period.
When Phoebe Saatchi Yates, the daughter of advertising mogul and famed collector Charles Saatchi, and her husband Arthur approached Abramović about doing an exhibition, the artist was won over by their youthful zeal. “Some of the ideas they suggested I thought, ‘over my dead body’,” she says matter-of-factly. “But they flew to New York and spent hours looking through my archive and found these videos that nobody knows about. Not even my own gallerist, Sean Kelly, had seen this piece. He was shocked. Now all my galleries are jealous. It’s an incredibly smart idea.”
Just as her entrepreneurial father reinvented British art with the YBA generation, Saatchi Yates and her husband have been injecting their brand of millennial and Gen Z pep into the London art scene since they opened their gallery five years ago, enticing a younger generation of collector with innovative exhibitions and parties to match. The Abramović opening on October 1 was accompanied by an all-night rave, although the artist left long before the music started. “I don’t drink, I don’t like parties, I have never gone to a rave,” she says. After 48 hours online, around a third of the photographs — priced at £1,800 each, relatively affordable in art world terms — had sold out.
I was 40 and felt so abandoned. I didn’t only lose a personal love; I also lost my work
The original work was made in 1988 in Dallas, where Abramović was staying while undertaking a three-month artist residency. She had just broken up with Ulay after he confessed he had got his translator pregnant. “It was a very unhappy moment in my life. I was staying in this awful motel. I was 40 and felt so abandoned and depressed and ugly,” Abramović recalls. “I didn’t only lose a personal love; I also lost my work. Everything was gone. I had to reinvent myself.” In the red-filtered video, Abramović seduces the viewer, playfully caressing her face and hair. In the blue video, she bites her fingers pensively. “In the first, the camera was my lover and in the second I was full of doubt and suffering,” she says.” Those were my two moods.”
If the videos mark a particularly low point in her life, today Abramović exudes happiness, her deadpan humour simmering just below the surface. She puts this down to “being in love” with her work — and her relationship with the film producer Todd Eckert, who is 21 years her junior. The couple have been together for nine years.
“Finally, after all these years of shitty relationships, I’ve found a good human being. He’s a workaholic, like me. He’s not the kind of man who sits at home waiting for me and then is in a bad mood because I’m out working. That’s torture, because you immediately feel guilty about having a career. With Todd, there’s no competition, he’s not jealous of my career. And we both have lots of fun.” When it comes to their individual work projects, Abramović says they share very little until the great reveal. “We like to surprise each other at our premieres,” she says.
Apart from Eckert and Ulay, Abramović has had two long-term partners: a Slavic artist she married when she was very young and an Italian artist she met after Ulay. “That was a huge mistake,” she says of the Italian. “For 12 years it was pretty wonderful, and then we got married. After two years, we divorced.” Marriage, Abramović thinks, is not healthy for any relationship. “When you get married, you stop making an effort. You take the other person for granted. Humans are not monogamous. Love comes and goes.”
Does the age gap with Eckert bother her? “I care more than he does. When I am 101, he’ll be 70-something. So that’s quite a difference. But he says he’s ageing faster than me. He doesn’t have a problem; I’m the one always thinking of the age difference,” she says. The couple live together in New York, though they are rarely at home. Despite the constant travel, their rule is never to be apart for longer than 10 days. They text each other first thing in the morning and last thing at night. When they are together, Eckert reads Abramović to sleep. “Ibsen, Yukio Mishima, whatever is on the shelf,” she says. “It’s just a normal relationship. There are no lies, no games.”
I’m so at peace, it takes a long time, but when you forgive, you forgive
In 2010, Abramović’s failed relationship with Ulay was thrust into the spotlight when he made a surprise appearance at her hit performance at MoMA in New York. For more than 700 hours, the artist sat at a table, inviting members of the public to sit opposite her so they could contemplate each other in silence. She had invited Ulay to the opening but had not expected him to take part in the performance. It was the first time the pair had seen each other in 22 years — but even that emotional reunion could not heal their deep rift.
After New York, Ulay returned to Amsterdam and sued Abramović for violating contracts relating to their joint works. She lost the case and was ordered to pay him €250,000. “I was so angry, it felt like such an injustice,” she says. To recover from the process, Abramović flew to India to spend time at an Ayurvedic hospital. By complete coincidence, Ulay had checked in to the same centre three hours before she arrived. After a month meditating and fasting, Abramović says they finally forgave each other. Not long after, Ulay died. Next month, the artist and Ulay’s widow will launch an exhibition of the pair’s work titled Love, Hate, Forgiveness. “I’m so at peace, it takes a long time, but when you forgive, you forgive,” she says.
It is the same philosophy Abramović believes will save us during such tumultuous times. She thinks America could be on the brink of civil war under Donald Trump, but prefers New York over Amsterdam, where she lived with Ulay but found unstimulating. “I need to be in hard places; Amsterdam was like a picture postcard.” She has been outspoken about the war in Ukraine, but thinks statements about Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Trump and Putin won’t change anything. “It’s just empty words. Only action can change things — and I can only act as an artist,” she says.
I don’t think it’s the right moment to do an exhibition in Israel
Beyond making statements with their art, artists are also increasingly questioning who to take money from and where to exhibit. Abramović’s RA exhibition had been due to travel to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art this year, but all parties agreed it was best to postpone the show. “I don’t think it’s the right moment to do an exhibition in Israel,” she says. There are no plans at present for the contract with the Israeli institution to be renewed.
Even though her performance practice was born out of the 1960s and 1970s, when female artists were declaring their bodies as battlegrounds, Abramović has never seen her work as political, much less feminist. Hers has been a spiritual path instead. She has worked with Tibetan Buddhists for the best part of 25 years and between 2012 and 2015 journeyed through Brazil exploring mystical traditions and healing practices, including shamanic rituals and ayahuasca ceremonies. Universal truths are what she seeks to tell — but those truths can’t be known through books, she says. “You have to actually make the journey.”
Marina Abramović by numbers
90 - Days she spent walking the Great Wall of China to meet her partner and collaborator Ulay. When they met in the middle, they broke up
72 - Number of objects an audience were allowed to use on her during her famous Rhythm 0performance in 1974
736 - Hours spent sitting in front of members of the public for The Artist is Present
2023 - The year she became the first woman to have a solo show in the main galleries at the Royal Academy
1 - The number of fingers between Abramović and death in Rest Energy, where she and Ulay balanced each other on opposite sides of a drawn bow and arrow, with the arrow pointed at her heart.
3 - Hours Lady Gaga spent exercising naked in a forest with her to learn The Abramović Method, an endurance test she uses to cleanse herself before performances
When we meet, the artist is preparing for what she describes as “the craziest thing I have done in my entire life” — a four-hour performance, Balkan Erotic Epic, which opened at Aviva Studios in Manchester on October 9. Across 13 scenes, a cast of more than 70 dancers and long-durational performers enact ancient rituals and folklore from Slavic tradition, many of them explicitly erotic. “Everyone is nude, basically, it’s going to be hell,” Abramović says, her excitement fizzing over. It is also a deeply personal project for the artist, who was born and raised in former Yugoslavia in a strict household where sex was taboo. For the first time, she is including her mother in her work.
Abramović shows me a few animations from the performance. In one, a group of women bare their vaginas to the sky to stop it raining — “you remember Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde? This is it in the flesh”. In another, a man massages a resting bull’s testicles after touching his own in a bid to get the beast moving again. In a third animation, a woman clips hair from all over her body and boils the locks to make a love potion.
Erotica might seem at odds with the current state of the world but, as Abramović points out, libido is profoundly tied to its opposite: death. “This isn’t about sex being some ridiculous thing, no, it’s a powerful message: sex and death go together,” she says. “I want to go into the past, rediscover the rituals that were used for agriculture, for growing cabbages, for fidelity, for fertility. We must go back to that primordial energy to understand who we are. From there, we can do something about the world.”
People in this country have to be drunk to have sex. The naked body is something to be ashamed of. It’s incredibly sad
Abramović is braced for strong reactions. “[The work] is about humanity, not pornography,” she says. The artist thinks nudity is a “huge problem” in Britain. “People in this country have to be drunk to have sex. The naked body is something to be ashamed of. It’s incredibly sad — the only information young people have about sex is through pornography.” She is convinced that if people had more sex, there would not be war.
There are very few artists who could pull off what Abramović does. On top of the major exhibitions and epic performances, she has tried her hand at opera, created an avatar, designed a wine label and even launched a line in wellness products. Then there’s the Marina Abramovic Institute, based in Greece, which trains artists and members of the public in long-durational performance, not only as an artistic practice but also as a way of living. She doffs her hat to Damian Hirst, whom she calls “a genius” for selling his art at Sotheby’s in 2008, just before the global financial crash. “The man broke the system; he’s incredible, but he really had a vision — and he had the ability. Before Sotheby’s, he made his diamond skull, which was a brilliant, sarcastic comment on the market. Then he opened his own gallery. He’s become totally independent from our system. Chapeau.”
Abramović has also broken free — and not just from the constraints of the art world. The last time we met, in 2021, she had just finished her opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, and thoughts had turned to her own funeral. There’s not a whiff of that now. Recently she turned down a well-known German film director who approached her about making the biopic of her life. “I told him it’s too early,” Abramović says. “He was surprised. He said no one had ever refused him at 80.” Her mother and grandmother lived into their late nineties; Abramović is aiming beyond that.
For all the spirituality, discipline and rigorous artistic practice, Abramović can also be gloriously lowbrow. “Everybody thinks that I meditate and do yoga everyday but it’s not true. There’s nothing eccentric about me. I’m very normal and I’m full of contradictions.”
She likes watching “good stuff but also trash” on Netflix. “I don’t like anything disturbing, or anything with violence,” she says. One of her favourite programmes is Heartland, a wholesome Canadian drama about a horse farm. In the winter, she knits shawls for her friends and play dominoes.
If one thing is clear, there are many sides to Abramović, but the one that persistently rises to the top is the fun, naughty, humorous one — whom I really like. As I pack up to leave after two hours in her hotel room (Abramović is also incredibly generous), she shows me a magazine article about a Slavic woman who knits willy warmers for men in the mountains. “I wanted to make these and sell them in the shop in Manchester,” she says. “But guess what? I ran out of time.”
Marina Abramović is at the Saatchi Yates until October 31
Photography by Marco Anelli
