Marina Abramović Maps Eight Decades in “Long Life, Short Stories”

Marina Abramović has spent more than five decades turning duration, risk, silence, and encounter into artistic material. Her new book, Long Life, Short Stories, shifts the scale inward. Instead of presenting a conventional career survey, the Rizzoli Electa volume assembles a personal map from brief memories, drawings, dreams, and reflections.

Published in the year of Abramović’s 80th birthday, the hardcover moves between love, sex, loss, fear, ancestry, nature, and creativity. The structure is deliberately nonlinear: major works and public milestones sit beside domestic episodes, jokes, rituals, and recollections that would disappear from a standard monograph.

The archive becomes intimate

Abramović’s performances are often described through extremes: stillness held for hours, the body placed under pressure, or an audience invited into an unpredictable exchange. Here, those public gestures are approached through the less visible material around them. Original drawings and archive photographs share space with compact stories, allowing psychological and emotional associations to emerge without forcing them into a single chronology.

That fragmented form suits an artist whose practice repeatedly asks what memory does to time. A recollection can become an instruction, a dream can sit beside a documented action, and a childhood detail can echo through a later performance. The book treats biography as a constellation rather than a straight line.

A book for a milestone year

The publication arrives during a year of large-scale projects marking Abramović’s eight decades, including work connected to New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Yet the book’s emphasis remains personal. Its mix of sketchbook, diary, and philosophy offers a quieter counterpart to the monumental performances for which she is best known.

Long Life, Short Stories contains 224 pages and roughly 300 color and black-and-white photographs and illustrations. Rizzoli Electa released the hardcover on October 6, 2026, with a list price of $65. Abramović will discuss the book at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York on October 29.

View publication details and ordering information from Rizzoli Electa, and read the original announcement at Hypebeast.

Featured image: Marina Abramović: Long Life, Short Stories. Courtesy Marina Abramović Archives and Rizzoli Electa.