If a memoir offers fans an opportunity to make a connecting conversation between the life and the art, it will never live up to the experience of witnessing Abramović’s live performances, which are always bigger than biography and psychology. Combining brand-new interviews, never-before-seen images and fascinating ephemera, this book is a testament to the extraordinary life and work of one of our most courageous and groundbreaking artists, and is published to coincide with the opening of Abramovic's Royal Academy exhibition - the first major show by a female artist in the Academy's 255-year history. She has presented her work at major institutions in the US and Europe, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,1985; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990; Neue National Galerie, Berlin, 1993, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1995. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Re-performances of some of her best-known and most radical pieces appear alongside new and recent work.

Agreeing to answer any question that was posed, Abramovic embarked on 17 months of candid interviews conducted by her friend and confidante, Katya Tylevich.I always want to hear someone’s story in their own words when possible and I do feel a bit bitter that I was denied that, even if the result is a spectacular story. She is author of Gus Van Sant: The Art of Making Movies, Art Oracles, Success Oracles, many book and monograph contributions, essays and interviews, and co-author of My Life as a Work of Art. Once when no one was looking (I was six or seven), I tried to wash him and almost drowned him—­I put him in the bath, and he went plop, under the water. But since I love art history so much the whole art memoir subgenre seems like a kind of no-brainer for me to expand into.

Later I discovered it had once belonged to wealthy Jews, and had been confiscated during the Nazi occupation. My father’s parents had seventeen kids, but my father’s mother only kept photographs around of her sons, never the daughters. It seems that audiences worked with her to figure out, in the present tense, the habits we have to lose to be truly in silent conversation about something that matters. For step-free access from the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road to the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium seating (excluding rows A to C) and wheelchair spaces in the Rear Stalls, plus Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer and the Purcell Room, please use the Queen Elizabeth Hall main entrance.The definitive guide to the life and work of Marina Abramović, the world's most famous performance artist.

Marina Abramovic is the world's most celebrated performance artist, nicknamed the "Grandmother of Performance Art" for her extensive body of work, she's led a fascinating life, from a dark childhood in postwar Yugoslavia to finding worldwide fame as an artist known for testing, and overcoming, the limits of fear and pain. A breathtakingly intimate journey, we are led across deserts, oceans and cities to explore extreme highs and lows, all the while marvelling at how Abramovic approaches every success and setback with her signature humour and wit.For someone who’s strived to break the artist/audience barrier using her body as a canvas, Abramovic’s personal history is largely unknown.

I found out later that when I was born, my father didn’t even tell anyone, but when Velimir came into the world, Vojo went out with friends, drinking, shooting pistols into the air, spending lots of money. For my mother, Communism was an abstract idea, something she’d learned about at school in Switzerland while studying Marx and Engels. Her handsome, philandering father was appointed to Tito’s elite guard; her mother, who was a major in the army, became director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. The energy present can help you induce different higher states of consciousness, like clairvoyance, astral travelling, and telepathy among others, besides bring each partcipant closer to her/himself through relaxation, increase of perception and paraperception, reflexion and travelling inside and outside yourself, further prospecting who you are as a self, a soul, a spirit. Photograph: Paola + Murray View image in fullscreen ‘You have to exhaust your own system of thinking’ … Marina Abramović in New York in 2015.The story is captivating always switching from the personal side to the artistic; the two are strictly interwined creating a strong sense of purpose in her life.