Marina Abramovic has earned worldwide acclaim for her performance art. Often enduring repeated injuries or remaining motionless for hours at a time, she transcends the limits of her body. Early on in her career, while living in her native Serbia, she lay down in a flaming five-point star until she lost consciousness. Over 40 years later, she positioned herself on a chair in MoMA and, every day for three months, engaged with her audience in silence, despite the intense pain that ravaged her back.

Through her extreme displays, she has sought to reclaim the genre of performance art from its marginal position in the art world, by showing that it can be a vehicle for highly emotive and political messages. Her motifs of hardship and endurance have frequently been described as a critique of the harsh Communist regime in which she grew up in Yugoslavia.

In a recent event at the RA, Abramovic spoke to students of the RA Schools about the lessons she has learned over her career. They ranged from the romantic to the professional. “Never fall in love with an artist,” she joked – referencing her creative and romantic partnership with Ulay, which ended after 12 years of collaboration. She went on to explain what it takes to be a performance artist, from ascetic training of both mind and body, to the ability to communicate with an audience through non-verbal means.

Here, we present four of the top moments from her discussion with the students, and with the journalist and writer Bryan Appleyard.