Marina Abramovic: the Kitchen

This is a superbly illustrated volume exploring celebrated artist Marina Abramovic's work, "The Kitchen". "The Kitchen" is a set of portrait photographs and video images of the "grandmother of performance art," Marina Abramovic. Shot in the abandoned space of a kitchen where Carthusian nuns had once fed more than 8,000 orphans, Abramovic is here seen cooking and meditating. Referencing Renaissance painting and the writings of Saint Theresa of Avila, in which the 16th-century nun describes her experiences of mystical levitation in church and kitchen. "The Kitchen" is equally an autobiographical work. "In my childhood," Abramovic explains, "the kitchen of my grandmother was the centre of my world [...] all my best memories come from there." Accompanying this book's images is a series of the artist's own spiritual recipes: a series of haikus, prayers and mantras to liberate the mind from the confused flow of thinking.