Marina Abramović is a workaholic, and a brave one at that.

In the name of art, she has laid inside a burning wooden star; been strangled by thick snakes; fasted for 12 days, and let an audience take control of her body using objects such as glass, candle, rose, hairbrush, mirror, gun, chains, axe and an array of sharp knives.

At 78 years old, the Serbian artist plans to go further with her next venture and enter — literally — the world of non-fungible tokens, otherwise known as NFTs.

In “Marina Abramović Element,” the artist will come to life digitally with help from TAEX, the digital art marketplace.

“I would love to have my avatar to do things my real body can’t. I can’t levitate, walk on fire or knives, or fly, but my avatar can. This could create all the performances of my dreams and that’s fantastic,” she says during an interview at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in London.

The project is based on a fictional story she’s written titled “Legend.” Three chapters of the story have been translated into NFTs. “Art” will be released in mid-June with a focus on her portraits followed by “Life,” in September, which touches on locations and gestures; while “Marina Abramović Method” will be released in November in what she describes as a “pursuit of self-discovery.”

The final NFT drop, “The Great Mint,” will happen in January 2026. People will be able to use the NFTs they’ve collected to access video artworks or extended animations.

Users gameplay as an avatar based on the artist and are rewarded with collectible items. The NFTs can be accessed on a mobile device and users can watch them on a loop.

The avatar has all of Abramović’s Balkan characteristics including her raven-colored hair, striking nose and hazel eyes.

Each movement that Abramović’s avatar makes has been practised by the artist in a green room over a hundred times for the technology to pick up on her nuances.

Abramović’s has spent much of the past year on the project — and still continues to refine it. For the artist, patience is not only a virtue, but a way of life. “I sat for three months in a museum looking at [more than] 1,500 people in the eyes for eight hours a day. Is this called patience or not?” she asks?

Repetition is a meditative act for her that she says opens up her consciousness and unlocks a fifth dimension, which is something she wants users to participate in.

One of the movements in “Marina Abramović Element” shows the artist opening a door and taking a step without entering the frame of the door. It’s one of the many drills of entering the fifth dimension, she says.

“The first five or six minutes of doing the movement is amusing, then you start to go crazy and wonder, ‘She’s totally out of her mind, why am I doing this stupid s–t?” Then after an hour, the door is no longer just a door — the door becomes the opening of the consciousness and a space for the mind to shift,” Abramović adds.

“Marina Abramović Element” is dotted with crystals such as clear quartz and amethysts. She calls crystals “simplified computers of the planet, all information is in crystals.”

The NFTs project opens up a world of possibilities to what she can do as a performance artist. She agreed to engage with this new format as a way to connect with her ever growing new audience of young people who are discovering her work for the first time. 

She said her audience now starts at the age of 14, and she now gets recognized in public.

“If you really want to have some kind of relationship with a young audience, you have to embrace technology because that’s what they start with at school. I’m using technology to create my own method of using it in a spiritual, meditative and positive way,” Abramović explains. 

She says she hates how addictive technology is becoming and hopes her project will introduce more holistic practices in the lives of her younger fans.

Abramović has started working with a group of children and one of the exercises she has them doing is putting on headphones without any sound playing to block out outside noises.

“They told me the headphones are broken. I said, ‘No, it’s about silence.’ Young kids have never heard silence in their life. I am actually taking technology and bringing them back into something that can completely transform their attachment [styles] and make them [break out of being] impatient and moving too fast. Kids can’t concentrate [for] more than 10 minutes,” she says.

Abramović says she finds her focus by being in nature. She calls studio work a trap.

“I like to go to countries where they don’t know what Coca-Cola is or they don’t have electricity — somewhere as far as I can go to see Indigenous cultures and to learn from them and nature. I live life and then from life comes the idea. I’m interested in the idea that I’m most afraid of, otherwise it’s the same s–t over and over again,” she says.

She finds that she’s most transformed when she’s doing long-term work over a period of months, to a year. “When you do something for three months, life and art become one thing — there’s no separation,” she adds.

Abramović’s most recent expedition was in the Mexican mountains.

“I loved Mexico because nobody spoke about Donald Trump and the [Mexican] people have dignity and traditions they still believe in,” she says.

In Mexico, a shaman told her that her energy is “too male” and to balance it out Abramović now wears a moonstone bracelet for “feminine energy.”

She describes herself as a warrior who’s always working on the front line.

Abramović is acknowledged as a pioneer, and refers to herself as the “grandmother of performance art.”

She was the first female artist to host a major solo exhibition in the Royal Academy of Arts’ 255-year-old history. In May, she was the first woman to show at the Accademia di Belle Arti at the Venice Biennale.

“It looks like I’m a bulldozer or a tractor — first me and then the girls can come. I always think women are so strong — just the power of creating life in your body is a huge power. And we just take this role of being submissive to men, which is complete bulls–t because we can actually do it very well,” she says.

Abramović has been making art and pushing her body for more than five decades yet she’s still indefatigable in her work ethic. “I love working, honestly,” she says.

In the autumn, she will present “Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic” at Factory International in Manchester, which explores eroticism, spirituality and rituals. The latter two are themes the artist first discovered as a child at her grandmother’s house.

Abramović’s work has always been educationally infused with Balkan wisdom and sensibilities from her childhood — she was born in Belgrade, Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia.

She does not see her art as a commercial venture. Even though NFTs have diminished in popularity, Abramović’s approach is totally different and far from the “tech bro” association.

Sébastien Devaud, a multidisciplinary artist better known to the Web3 space as Agoria, argues that the NFT and digital art space may seem more quiet because an “inflated value of works with no real substance has vanished” leaving room for works with deeper meaning.

Digital artists’ creations are now being taken more seriously and studied with care, he said.

Agoria was invited by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris last year to present two pieces of digital artwork.

He said he prefers the muted scene of NFTs and digital art now.

“The noise from gambling and the wave of speculators chasing quick money has faded. What remains are those truly passionate about the technology, the meaning, the innovation. Now, real progress can begin,” he added, reiterating that he’s genuinely optimistic about the work that’s being produced.

The numbers of people interacting with NFTs are not what they used to be, but the audiences engaging with NFTs are more “intentional” with their choices and are there for “the right reasons.”

Abramović is purposeful in what she sets her heart on.

She’s entering the NFTs space at a calm time that suits her rhythm, one that could almost be reminiscent of life in the ‘70s, before the boom of technology.

Abramović is an artist from simpler times.

“Telegrams were the way to communicate. You’d pay by the word when sending a letter at the post office and then you’d wait 10 days to get an answer, nowadays you write one email and you get an answer immediately. It’s hell,” she says.

But Abramović is a disrupter. It’s hard to imagine her making art that’s considered steady. She loves extremes and danger, no wonder a scorpion crawls across her face in one of her NFTs while remaining still and present.