In a Naples gallery in 1974, Marina Abramović stood still for six hours beside 72 objects, from a feather and a rose to a scalpel and a gun with a single bullet, and let the audience do whatever they wanted. This episode traces how she got there: a Belgrade childhood split between a devoutly Orthodox grandmother and communist partisan parents, a mother who beat her and imposed a 10 p.m. curfew until she was 29, and the Rhythm series in which she stabbed a knife between her fingers, lay inside a burning pentagram, and passed out from lack of oxygen.

We follow her decade with Ulay as a two-headed body, from breathing each other's exhaled air to Rest Energy, where a drawn bow pointed an arrow at her heart, and their 1988 breakup walking the Great Wall of China from opposite ends. The conversation covers Balkan Baroque, scrubbing bloody cow bon ...