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Pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic is leaving New York for London saying there has been “a strange vibration” in the US city since the election of Donald Trump.

The 71-year-old self-styled “gypsy nomad” has been based in New York for the past 17 years, but is coming to London next year and has her eye on a property in Spitalfields.

She told ES Magazine: “There is a very strange vibration and energy in New York right now.

“It’s interesting, since Trump is president, my work is more in Europe and Asia. I really love London right now.

“It’s so vibrant with so many foreigners passing through and such a diverse art scene.”

Belgrade-born Abramovic, who calls herself the “grandmother of performance art”, made her name with a series of daring physical works in which she asked members of the audience to pick up objects including a whip, scissors and a scalpel and do what they wanted to her. In 2010, her show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art attracted 850,000 visitors, with 1,000 of them, including Björk, Sharon Stone and Lou Reed, queueing up to sit opposite her across a wooden table and stare at her.

Last month, she hit the headlines again when an Italian painter attacked her with a portrait he had painted of her during a visit to Florence.

Abramovic is preparing for her 2020 Royal Academy show where she plans to charge herself with one million volts of electricity. She has been exploring how she could safely carry out the performance, where she plans to use the charge to extinguish a candle from a metre away, with the help of a goat farmer and engineer from Dorset.

She said: “The public is sick and tired of just looking at something, and wants to be a part of it. And I want to be able to give them that role; for me, the public is increasingly the work of art and I am the ­conductor.”

Full interview in ES Magazine.