Internationally acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramović Hon RA will deliver the second Rothschild Foundation Lecture at 7pm on the 18th November 2019 at the Royal Academy of Arts, ahead of her forthcoming exhibition at the Academy in September 2020.

Internationally recognised as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Abramović uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being. Abramović will explore her 50-year art career focusing on the body as material, her relationship to the public, as well as her vision for the future of long durational and immaterial art. This event will also be an exciting opportunity to learn more about the new work she will present in 2020 in her solo exhibition at the RA: Marina Abramović. Abramović will be joined by the RA’s Artistic director Tim Marlow for a Q&A following her lecture.

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form’s most important early works. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale.

In 2008, she was decorated with the Austrian Commander Cross for her contribution to art history. In 2010, Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2014, she completed the three-month performance 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Abramović founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long-durational work, to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. The institute inhabited its most complete form to date in 2016 in collaboration with NEON in As One, Benaki Museum, Athens.

Her most recent publication is Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, Published by Crown Archetype in October, 2016, and it has subsequently been translated into 19 languages internationally. Her retrospective, The Cleaner, opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in February 2017 and has toured to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, and Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The exhibition will continue on to Centre for Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Toruń, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade in 2019.

Booking opens to Friends of the RA at 10am on Friday 6 September 2019. Booking opens to the public at 10am on Tuesday 10 September 2019. For more information and for tickets, please visit the Royal Academy website.

For those unable to attend the lecture in person, the lecture will also be live streamed on the Royal Academy website.