Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

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Combining brand-new interviews, never-before-seen images and fascinating ephemera from her personal archives, this book creates a visual landscape of the artist's personal and artistic life. The definitive guide to the life and work of Marina Abramovic, the world’s most famous performance artist. She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". Walk Through Walls begins with a memorable forest walk that Abramović takes with her grandmother when she is four.

A joke from Communist times: A guy retires, and for having been such an exceptional worker, he is awarded, instead of a watch, a new car, and they tell him at the office he’s very lucky—­he’ll get his car on such and such a date, in twenty years. For my mother, Communism was an abstract idea, something she’d learned about at school in Switzerland while studying Marx and Engels. I was punished frequently, for the slightest infraction, and the punishments were almost always physical—­hitting and slapping. Her work – notorious for its feats of endurance, pain and intense physical encounter – has pushed the boundaries of contemporary art and cemented her reputation as one of the most significant artists of the past 50 years. An artist’s notebooks are arguably the most authentic means of understanding her process, techniques, and impulses.Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramovic’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours.

The facility includes a height-adjustable bench, tracking hoist system, a centrally-placed toilet, a height-adjustable basin and a shower. An augmented-reality app for iOS and Android enables readers to watch films of Abramović’s original performances while reading the book. br>Svetlana Racanović is Professor of Theory of Contemporary Art in the Faculty of Fine Arts Cetinje at the University of Montenegro. The act of writing a memoir as enjoyable as Walk Through Walls allows her to play with this paradox.And then there was my father’s love of women, the thing that had drawn him to my mother in the first place. Let’s get this out of the way: Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović is a controversial figure, and much as I’d love to shove her ghostwritten memoir into everyone’s hands, I must admit that there are plenty of people who will remain thoroughly unmoved by it, and that’s completely fine.

Never shying away from the truth, no stone is left unturned, and Abramovic's fearlessness imbues every page. Personally I would wrap it in paper as well as the space fillers but in all it arrived in good condition. I remember my grandmother saying that when my mother left home to join the partisans, she left behind sixty pairs of shoes, taking only one pair of old peasant shoes with her. Fittingly blurring the lines between artist and art, this book acts as a keystone in the life of one of the most important performance artists in the world.The book could have been way better with an index as there were plenty of stories I wanted to re-read but couldn't find. From her early childhood, she explains her upbringing and really installs a feeling of sympathy from the word go. 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. As though the leaders had looked through the lens of someone else’s Communism and built something less good and less functional and more fucked-­up.