Art by Marina Abramović & Ulay

For twelve years, Abramović and the Amsterdam-based artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) worked as a single collaborative entity, and some of the most unsettling performance art of the 1970s and '80s came out of that partnership. In Rest Energy (1980), the two stood facing each other holding opposite ends of a drawn bow, an arrow pointed directly at Abramović's heart, each leaning back to keep the tension taut. Microphones on their chests amplified their heartbeats, audibly speeding up, for the four minutes and ten seconds it took to complete. One slipped grip either way and someone would have been shot.

Imponderabilia (1977) had them standing naked, facing each other in a narrow gallery doorway, forcing every visitor who wanted to enter the exhibition to squeeze between their bodies and choose, uncomfortably, which of them to face. AAA-AAA had them screaming into each other's open mouths until their voices gave out.

The relationship, and the collaboration, ended together in 1988 with The Lovers, the Great Wall of China walk: a planned wedding that became, instead, a scripted goodbye. Ulay and Abramović remained tied together in the public imagination for decades afterward regardless, reconciling publicly at MoMA in 2010 before a later, messier legal dispute over royalties. Ulay died in 2020.