The Royal Academy of Arts presents the first major solo survey in the UK of the work of internationally acclaimed Serbian performance artist and Honorary Royal Academician, Marina Abramović (b. 1946). In a career that spans over five decades, Abramović propels performance art from its experimental beginnings to the mainstream. The exhibition, arranged in close collaboration with the artist, provides an overview of her extraordinary practice with photographs, videos, objects and installations. It also features four of Abramović’s seminal performance pieces, which are reperformed by performance artists living in the galleries.

For the past 50 years, she has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental endurance in her work, subjecting herself to exhaustion, pain and even the possibility of death. Significantly it is the first solo exhibition of a woman artist across the entire Main Galleries in the RA’s 250 year history.

The exhibition features re-performances of “Imponderabilia, Nude with Skeleton”, “Luminosity and The House with the Ocean View” by the next generation of performance artists trained in the Marina Abramović method at different intervals during the duration of the show. Other works such as “The Artist is Present” is strikingly re-staged through archive footage. The exhibition foregrounds the transformative power of performance art.