Marina Abramović Turns Eight Decades of Life Into ‘Long Life, Short Stories’
The new illustrated volume brings together drawings, memories and personal reflections from across the artist’s life and career.
Summary
Marina Abramović reflects on memory, creativity and personal philosophy in Long Life, Short Stories.
The illustrated volume blends drawings, anecdotes and introspection.
Published by Rizzoli Electa, the 224-page book is priced at $65 USD.
Marina Abramović turns inward for Long Life, Short Stories, a new illustrated volume that reframes one of performance art’s most uncompromising careers through memories, drawings and personal reflection. The book unfolds as what its publisher, Rizzoli Electa, describes as part sketchbook, part diary and part personal philosophy, moving through subjects including love, sex, loss, fear, nature, ancestry, creativity, dreams and even love spells. The fragmented format feels particularly suited to an artist whose practice has long used lived experience as material, offering a more intimate counterpart to the endurance, vulnerability and physical risk that have defined her public work.
Published as Abramović celebrates her 80th birthday in 2026, the book arrives at another significant point in a career that helped establish performance art as a major contemporary discipline. Since emerging in the early 1970s, the Serbia-born artist has repeatedly tested the physical and psychological boundaries between performer and audience, from early works including Rhythm 0 and Rhythm 5 to her landmark 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective The Artist Is Present. Long Life, Short Stories approaches that history from a deliberately different angle. Original drawings created for the publication sit alongside direct, often humorous accounts and philosophical observations, revealing some of the emotional and psychological terrain behind works more commonly discussed through ideas of endurance, time, presence and bodily limits.
The book is less a chronological autobiography than a loosely assembled map of Abramović’s inner world, shifting between the mystical, provocative and unexpectedly everyday while allowing personal episodes to sit alongside broader reflections on creativity and human connection. It also adds a more private dimension to a milestone year that includes major projects surrounding her 80th birthday, including a large-scale presentation at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.
Marina Abramovic: Long Life, Short Stories spans 224 pages in hardcover and is priced at $65 USD via Rizzoli. Abramović will also mark the release at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York on October 29 with a conversation alongside Michèle Lamy centered on artistic freedom, the expressive possibilities of the body and a life spent creating beyond convention.
