Marina Abramović (b. 1946, Belgrad). Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramovic has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form’s most important early works. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger, in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Abramovic was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. 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 in New York. Abramović founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. Abramović published her memoir, Walk Through Walls, with Crown Archetype on October 25th, 2016. Her most recent publication is A Visual Biography, which was published by Laurence King in 2023. Her retrospective “The Cleaner” opened at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in February 2017 and toured to seven additional European venues, ending at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia, in 2019. In September 2020 the Bayerische Staats Opera presented the world premiere of Marina’s opera project 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which has continued to tour to various cities across Europe. In September 2023 she opened her solo exhibition at the Royal Academy and became the first female artist in the institution’s 250-year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work.

The pseudonym of Frank Uwe Laysiepen, Ulay (b. 1943, Solingen, Germany, d. 2020, Ljubljana, Slovenia) was an artist whose oeuvre was centered at the intersection of photography and the conceptually-oriented approaches of performance and body art. Between 1968 and 1971, after training as a photographer, Ulay worked extensively as a consultant for Polaroid, which inspired him to start experimenting with the analogue camera and the instant photography it provided. Taking hundreds of self-portraits, each manipulated in a myriad of ways, Ulay developed an approach that was novel in both method and subject matter, using the camera as a tool to investigate and modify identity, whilst exploring socially constructed issues of gender. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ulay’s photographic approach became demonstratively performative, resulting in a long-term collaboration with Marina Abramović. Working together from 1976 to 1988, they focused on pushing the physical limitations of the mind and body. Through their Relation Work series, numerous actions and performative pieces, they became icons of performance art. In the 1990s, Ulay returned predominantly to photography, critically evaluating the position of the marginalized individual in contemporary society and the vulnerability of others, addressing issues of nationalism, racism and inequality. Recent solo exhibitions and performances have been held at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Depart Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Cooper Gallery, Dundee, UK; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland; Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom; C-Space, Beijing, China; and National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscow, Russia. His work, along with his many collaborations with Marina Abramović, is featured in collections of major institutions around the world, including the Stedelijk Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Kunstmuseum Bern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).