The Communicator, 2012

Having become a superstar in the art world, someone who can move masses of people like a pop diva, Marina Abramović, over  time, has toned down the violence of her performances, which, in the 1970s, led to her reputation as an artist who defied physical pain and pushed her body to the limit. Instead she has come to accentuate the symbolic aspect and the theatrical dimension of actions, going beyond the need to affirm the body above all the female body - typical of her earlier work, to focus on a search for universal meanings. In this sense her performance Balkan Baroque, which won the Golden Lion award at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and where she spent four consecutive days cleaning the blood and flesh off a gigantic pile of bones, put the artist not only at the center of the suffering in her native Balkans, devastated by war during that period, but also at the center of all wars and all suffering in the world. [...]