An artist who is famed for shocking performance art once swapped places with a sex worker for six hours.
For more than five decades, Marina Abramović has been redefining the boundaries of performance art - sometimes quite literally putting her body on the line in the name of artistic expression.
Back in the 1970s, she stunned the art world with her groundbreaking performance Rhythm 0.
In a gallery in Naples, she stood completely still for six hours, surrounded by 72 objects - including a scalpel, scissors, chains, and even a loaded gun. The audience was invited to use the items however they liked.
Abramović was stripped, slashed, and had a gun pressed to her head. "The public, if they want to kill me, they can kill me," she later said. "I was very foolish, I have to tell you, in that time, because I was absolutely going to the end, and I was lucky to survive."
But that wasn’t the only provocative project in her portfolio. In 1975, she ventured into the red light district of Amsterdam for a project called Role Exchange.
The idea was to trade places with a sex worker for six hours.
"I asked her to go to the gallery and be me and I sit in the window and become her," she explained.
"It was pretty scary stuff to do, but this was in 1975, I did it for six hours, it was so fascinating."
The experiment was her way of confronting the stigma she was raised with. “Being a prostitute was the lowest thing to be,” she said, revealing that her mother would “just die” if she knew.
The role swap came with a learning curve. According to Abramović, the sex worker told her not to lower her price, warning it would "spoil business."
She recalled: “So I had the two customers; one asked about her, and the second one didn't want to pay the price. She said to me that I would starve if I will be (a) prostitute because I don't have any talent for that role.”
Fast forward to 2005, and Abramović was making headlines again with her reenactment of Seedbed, originally performed in 1972 by artist Vito Acconci.
In the original, Acconci hid under a ramp and masturbated for hours while voicing his fantasies through loudspeakers.
Abramović took on the same challenge as part of her Seven Easy Pieces series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York - and she didn’t hold back.
Hidden beneath the ramp, she masturbated while a recording of her fantasies played for visitors above.
"Having orgasms publicly, being excited by the visitors steps above me — it’s really not easy, I tell you! I’ve never concentrated so hard in my life," she told New York Magazine.
She added: “I ended with nine orgasms. It was terrible for the next piece — I was so exhausted!”