You won’t be able to bring any bags over 40 x 25 x 25cm into the Queen Elizabeth Hall, so please leave large bags at home.

This valuable memoir also documents the most famous of her recent exhibitions – The Artist Is Present at MoMA in 2010, and 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery in 2014 – in which she herself was the main exhibit. Her handsome, philandering father was appointed to Tito’s elite guard; her mother, who was a major in the army, became director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. Compiled over the course of four decades on stationery from various hotels, and other temporary residences, this collection of Marina Abramović’s original drawings, collages, poetry, writings, cut-outs, photographs, and doodles offers glimpses of a brilliant mind in constant motion. It is a wry invitation to trace how such themes have been a preoccupation over five decades of groundbreaking performance art. Her work – notorious for its feats of endurance, pain and intense physical encounter – has pushed the boundaries of contemporary art and cemented her reputation as one of the most significant artists of the past 50 years.So my more emotional self wishes it weren’t ghostwritten and my more rational self thinks it isn’t a deal-breaker, lol.

Likewise, although Abramović is famous and highly visible (Time magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people, alongside Barack Obama and Pope Francis), she is aware that her investigation into all the dimensions of presence requires the absence of her own ego. Photograph: Paola + Murray View image in fullscreen ‘You have to exhaust your own system of thinking’ … Marina Abramović in New York in 2015. Adrian Heathfield is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London. While Abramović’s skills as a performer obviously require physical training, it is the quality of her presence that actually moves people and draws large audiences.It combines new interviews, never-before-seen images and fascinating ephemera from Abramović’s personal archives to create a visual landscape of her personal and artistic life. He fought with the 13th Montenegro Division, a group of guerillas that made lightning raids on the Germans; it took impossible courage. But once during a German advance she came down with typhus, and was lying unconscious among the badly wounded, with a high fever and completely covered by a blanket. Once when no one was looking (I was six or seven), I tried to wash him and almost drowned him—­I put him in the bath, and he went plop, under the water.