MARINA MARKOVIĆ

The body and embodiment are central to the themes, materials, and methodologies of my artistic practice. I work with a corporeal language that explores the porous boundary between the female body, the self, and the social pressures that shape them. Pleasure, control, and resistance intersect and mutually condition one another, while power is simultaneously constructed, enacted, and questioned. The body becomes a site of negotiation, transgression, and reclamation, asserting its autonomy while confronting the structures that seek to define and appropriate it.

Marina Marković

The corporeal is the central focus of Marina Marković’s (Yugoslavia, 1983) artistic practice, which spans from personal experience to the exploration of complex social issues concerning women’s bodies. The experience of anorexia in her early youth directed her work towards the politics of the body, the (de)construction of gender and sexuality, and the economics of desire, while revealing the network of power relations where free will and coercion are densely intertwined.

Since 2006, she has presented solo exhibitions and performances in Belgrade/RS, New York/US, Vienna/AT, Paris/FR, Bern/CH. A recent long-term project, The Arrangement, has unfolded through multiple iterations across different venues, ultimately culminating in a comprehensive exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2024). Her works have been featured in international exhibitions and biennials, including Histoires personnelles / Réalités politiques at Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon in 2025, Performissima at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris in 2025 and 60. and Aesthetic(s) of Encounter(s) at 60.October Salon in Belgrade in 2024. Marković has participated in numerous artist-in-residence programmes, including residencies at ISCP New York/US and Q21/MuseumsQuartier Vienna/AT.

Marković is the recipient of several prestigious awards, such as the Young Visual Artist “Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos” Award in 2011 and the Drawing Award given by the “Vladimir Veličković” Foundation in 2021. Her works are part of significant public and private collections, including museum collections nationally and internationally. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the New Media Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Marković lives and works in between Belgrade and Paris.

THE ARRANGEMENT(S)— chapter 2

The Arrangement(s) was a major solo exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, presenting the culmination of four years of work and over 120 institutional arrangements tattooed on Marina Marković’s skin. For this exhibition, she invited five theorists — Jesha Denegr, Daniele Capra, Lucrezia Nardi, Matthieu Lelièvre, and ORLAN — to contribute texts reflecting on her practice. These contributions were then combined into a single meta-text, which was inscribed onto her body during a five-hour live performance by three tattooists.

The resulting “theoretical grid” overlays the previous institutional logos, creating a conceptual frame that integrates and reinterprets the archive of her past arrangements. In this way, the artist’s body becomes both a living archive and an active site of thought, where past inscriptions, new theoretical reflections, and the act of writing intersect, overlap, and continuously negotiate meaning.

Marina Marković, Arrangement, performance and installation view, Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade/RS, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Bojana Janjić, Andrija Rančić, Ivan Zupanc.

THE ARRANGEMENT— chapter 1

The Arrangement is an ongoing long-term project that Marina Marković began in 2020, investigating dynamics of power, autonomy, and institutional authority through the female body. In the first chapter, she tattoos institutional logos onto her body in collaboration with galleries, museums, and other institutions, based on negotiated arrangements inspired by BDSM protocols of consent and power play.

Tattooing marks the skin as a semi-permeable boundary, a surface for projection and site of negotiation, where power is continuously given, taken, and shifted. By making institutional influence visible on the body, the work examines how social and institutional norms penetrate, shape, and are resisted by corporeal experience, highlighting the constant circulation of power and the interplay between personal agency and external expectations.

Marina Marković, Arrangement, performace and installation view, Goethe-Institut, X Vitamin Gallery, Belgrade/RS, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Subotica/RS, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Ivan Zupanc.

THE ARRANGEMENT — chapter 3

Presented at Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (CWB), Paris as part of the Performissima Festival, Marina Marković’s ongoing performance series The Arrangements enters its third chapter. Following previous acts involving institutional logos and theoretical frameworks tattooed onto her body, this iteration introduces the curatorial layer. Eight curators — Jean-Max Colard, Vittoria Matarrese, Jean-Christophe Arcos, Matthieu Lelièvre, Stéphanie Pécourt, Antoine Pickels, Olivia Voisin, and Lucrezia Nardi — each contributed a sentence and their signature, permanently inscribed on the artist’s skin. Marković’s body becomes a living contract, a site of negotiation where authorship dissolves and power is etched into flesh. The work confronts the boundaries between agency and submission, visibility and vulnerability.

Marina Marković, Arrangement, performace and installation view, CWB Performissima, Le Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris/FR, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Ari Bafalouka.

THE ARRANGEMENT–AESTHETIC(S) OF ENCOUNTER(S)

For the 60th October Salon, Marina Marković presented a site-specific installation in the museum basement as part of her ongoing project Arrangement. For this occasion, the October Salon logo was tattooed onto her body while her physiological responses were recorded using multiple devices, including EKG, EMG, and other sensors. The work observes the skin as an ambiguous territory, where internal and external realities intersect, and boundaries are continuously negotiated and challenged. Through tattooing and performative agreements, Marković explores the dual nature of power as it is constantly given and taken, making vulnerability a strategy of resistance and engagement. The piece transforms the body into a living palimpsest of biographical, theoretical, and institutional traces, where socially constructed norms penetrate and the body reconfigures them. Operating at the edge of experience, the work demonstrates how change in perception is possible only at the intersection of internal and external, self and Other. The project exemplifies feminist edgework, emphasizing consensual collaboration and negotiation with power structures, and revealing the skin as a site where authority, intimacy, and institutional pressures meet, collide, and circulate.

Marina Marković, Arrangement, installation view, 60th October Salon, Belgrade/RS, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Bojana Janjić.

THERE IS NO REALITY BESIDES CORPOREALITY

“There is no reality besides corporeality, since the female body is a threshold where nature and science confront culture and politics.” — Marija Racković

This sentence, taken from a theoretical text written about Marković’s work, became the first in a series of theoretical statements later inscribed onto her body. It marks the point where her practice positions the body as the primary site of reality, where power, visibility, and institutional structures become tangible.

Marković’s work unfolds at this threshold, where the biological confronts the cultural and political, and where each mark becomes part of a continuous, lived project.

Marina Marković, There is no reality besides corporeality, video stills, Belgrade/RS, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

PRESSURE ME

Pressure Me was a long-term project developed between 2011 and 2016, exploring how socially constructed ideals and normative measurements discipline and shape the female body. The project spanned video, installation, and live performance, addressing the painful daily rituals women carry out to approximate or conform to societal standards of beauty.

A central part of the project was the tattooing of tailor’s tape measures on the artist’s body—chest 90 cm, waist 60 cm, hips 90 cm—fixed at “ideal” proportions dictated by dominant heteropatriarchal norms. The soft, delicate pink color of the tattoos contrasted with the disciplinary nature of the measurements, creating a subtle tension—a visual metaphor for the “soft violence” of societal expectations. By permanently inscribing these externally constructed standards, the performance made visible how norms are internalized and embodied, highlighting the intimate and often contradictory experience of living under such pressures.

The project was realized through live performances in New York (2012), Bern and Belgrade (2013), and Geneva (2014). Pressure Me revealed the ambivalence of female corporeality, where acts of discipline produce both discomfort and satisfaction, and blurred the line between voluntary choice and social coercion. Abstract standards of beauty—applied to the living female body—become captured and materialized within it, forcing the body to expand, deform, and distort. By appropriating and making these measurements visible, the project created the conditions for their critical deconstruction, allowing the body to confront, unravel, and destabilize the norms that seek to discipline it.

Marina Marković, Pressure Me, performance and installation view, Schlachthaus Theater, Bern 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Sanja Latinović.

DRAWINGS – TO PLEASE, TO SERVE, TO OBEY

Through the series To Please, To Serve, To Obey, Marina Marković investigates the female body as a site of discipline, desire, and social control. Her depersonalized, hypersexualized figures—rendered in meticulous pen and ink—navigate the tension between submission and autonomy, objecthood and self-assertion. Drawing on feminist theory, the series exposes how corporeality mediates power, pleasure, and resistance, showing that social norms are not only imposed but internalized and enacted. Beyond corporeality, the body becomes a terrain where shame, guilt, and jouissance intersect, a space in which constraint and desire coexist, and where bodies, disciplined and docile, assert themselves in defiance of imposed structures.

Marina Marković, To Please, to Serve, to Obey, drawings, Belgrade/RS, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Andrija Rančić.