S6 EP7: Marina Abramovic on the relationship between performance and pain, never feeling loved in her childhood, and harmful conspiracies
The Louis Theroux Podcast
Spotify Studios
4.1 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Mike number one, mic number one. |
| 0:01.6 | Isn't this a lot of fun? |
| 0:07.9 | Hello there, and welcome back to the podcast that I like to call the Louis Theroux podcast. |
| 0:26.4 | And for our final episode of the run, we have something a little bit different. |
| 0:30.1 | We're going into the realms of art, not just art, but performance art. |
| 0:35.1 | In fact, the self-professed grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramovich. |
| 0:39.3 | We've had an artist on before, Tracy Eman, you'll remember her. |
| 0:50.7 | Marina is, I would say, just as celebrated, illustrious, internationally fated. But she takes us into a realm in which the body and performance, the clue is in the word, are the means of expression. |
| 0:57.3 | And in this world where I'm talking about the wider world now, people watch YouTube, we're all glued to influencers and YouTubers doing what they call endurance challenges. |
| 1:09.7 | Have you come across that? Mr. Beast staying up, counting from |
| 1:12.8 | one to 10,000 or 100,000 or whatever, or I stayed in a box for 10 days, I went without sleep |
| 1:20.5 | for three weeks, whatever. I was kind of curious to see the performance art end of that. |
| 1:26.4 | I mean, these are completely unrelated worlds, but there's |
| 1:28.8 | something in the idea of putting ourselves through something intolerable that is captivating |
| 1:34.1 | in an almost voyeuristic way. And while there is much more to her than just that, certainly Marina |
| 1:40.5 | embodies parts of that. She's pioneered various forms of conceptual and performance art |
| 1:46.6 | exploring body art endurance art, we sort of talked about that, and involvement of the audience to test the |
| 1:52.8 | physical limits of the body through performance. So even if you may be slightly art-averse, |
| 2:00.7 | I think you may still be intrigued to hear |
| 2:03.6 | how all of this works and the strange lengths to which Marina's performances and others in that space |
| 2:10.6 | can take them. Long-duration is a word that comes up a lot in the chat. It just means she's doing something for a long time. |
| 2:19.6 | Her most famous piece, arguably, is called The Artist Is Present, |
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