In 2010 the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović held a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition included approximately fifty works spanning more than four decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) (Biesenbach 2010). In an endeavour to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition also included live re-performances of Abramović's works by other people, as well as a new, original work performed by Abramović herself called The Artist Is Present in which she sat motionless every day for three months during the period of the retrospective, a total of 600 hours (Biesenbach 2010).

Abramović deliberately choreographs or sets up possibilities for particular kinds of physical experiences through sets of instructions to herself as the performer and/or to the audience that act like a kind of manual. They frequently refer to or involve objects. For example, in Rhythm 10 (1973) she set out to explore concepts of ritual, gesture, time and repetition making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders. She rhythmically jabbed a knife aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record and rewind the operation (Biesenbach 2010). She has also created work which relates living to dead bodies (Sofaer 2012). Her performances differ from theatre or acting inasmuch as they are about real rather than acted or superficial experiences (Abramović 2010). For her, Russian roulette is a metaphor for the difference between acting and performance; whereas an actor uses a fake gun and feigns death, a performance artist uses a loaded gun and risks death (Biesenbach 2010: 19).