Similar to the art that she creates, different opinions abound regarding Marina Abramović. She has been called an enigma, an icon, a sell-out, a genius, a dilettante. Form your own opinion on the controversial artist in Walk Through Walls, a never before seen look into the early life and creation of one of the most recognizable artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her origin story informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist and provocateur Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe until the relationship began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China.

Marina’s life has been singular, and her voice on the page—its cadence steeped in her Balkan roots—is nothing short of electrifying. You hear her perfectly imperfect English on every page and the result is enchanting. In story after story, Marina plumbs the sublime march to artistic truth, and along the way she evokes not only her own coming of age, but an era of artistic ferment and possibility, the thread of which she has never lost. Her stalwart insistence on facing pain and fear and vulnerability in the starkest possible terms as an artist comes to life in this vivid, candid memoir.

Published by Crown Archetype | Released October 25, 2016