The visionary, world-renowned Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović (1946) is an icon of recent art history. Her oeuvre is characterised by the relationship between the artist and the viewer, identity, and the pushing of physical and mental boundaries in search of spiritual transformation. Between 1976 and 1988, she worked as part of a duo with the German artist and her then partner, Ulay. Mental and physical endurance was also the essence of their joint works. A recent highlight of her career was her three-month long performance The Artist is Present from 2010, in which visitors were invited to sit in a chair facing her and look at her for as long as they liked. This intense performance was also part of a major retrospective of her work at the MOMA in New York. Her other famous performances have included Balkan Baroque, for which she received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1997), Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in New York (2005) and 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2014). She founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), where visitors can be immersed in the Abramović Method. She recently published her memoirs: Walk Through Walls. For Pelléas et Mélisande she collaborated for the second time as a stage designer with choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, with whom she had previously worked in 2013 on a new choreography to Maurice Ravels’ Boléro for the Paris Opera Ballet.