Spirit House, Five Stages

To the accompaniment of a tango, a solitary woman dances in a black dress in an indefinable space. “Insomnia” is one of the videos made of performance works showing one and the same woman, the artist herself, in various situations. Marina Abramović is a pioneer in performance art. She studied at the academies in Belgrade and Zagreb from 1965 to 1972, and used her own body as art, a controversial approach in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s. In her ritual performance pieces, she put her physical limits to the test by exposing herself to pain and danger, often with a focus on endurance, as her works extended over long periods of time. The concrete physical experience in the works was the artist’s way of taking mental leaps.