Marina Abramović has returned to Berlin for her first major solo presentation in the city since the 1990s, occupying the Gropius Bau with an exhibition titled "Balkan Erotic Epic." Co-curated by Agnes Gryczkowska and Jenny Schlenzka, the show is less a retrospective and more a visceral exploration of the body as a site of political and spiritual friction. The installation weaves together historical performances with new works, positioning the erotic not as provocation, but as a fundamental driver of fertility, mortality, and transformation.
The choice of Berlin is not incidental. The city has long served as a crossroads for Eastern and Western European cultural currents, and Abramović's own biography — born in Belgrade, shaped by the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and active across the major art capitals of the West — mirrors that geography of displacement. Gropius Bau, a venue with its own layered history as a site of institutional reinvention in reunified Germany, provides a fitting architecture for work that insists on the entanglement of personal memory and collective trauma.
Folklore as Artistic Method
The exhibition draws heavily from Balkan folklore, translating ancient rituals into a contemporary vocabulary of film, sculpture, and live action. Abramović has explored this territory before. Her 2005 video series of the same name, Balkan Erotic Epic, catalogued folk practices in which sexuality functioned not as taboo but as a communal technology — a means of warding off storms, blessing harvests, and mediating between the living and the dead. The Berlin presentation extends that inquiry, placing the earlier work in dialogue with newer pieces that deepen the investigation.
In the video work Tito's Funeral (2025), Abramović captures women in a trance-like state of communal mourning, their rhythmic chest-beating serving as a bridge between personal grief and national history. The title invokes the death of Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav leader whose passing in 1980 set in motion the slow unraveling of a multinational state. That event remains a fault line in Balkan memory — a moment when collective identity began to fracture along ethnic and religious lines. By returning to it through the vocabulary of ritual lamentation, the work resists reducing history to political narrative and instead locates it in the body's involuntary responses: breath, rhythm, the voice breaking under strain.
This tension between the individual and the collective is a recurring motif, underscored by live performances that feature brass band processions and the traditional vocalizations of Svetlana Spajić. The inclusion of live elements is consistent with Abramović's long-standing insistence that performance art derives its force from the unmediated presence of performer and audience in shared time. It also distinguishes the exhibition from the museum survey format, which tends to embalm performance in documentation.
The Body Against the Archive
By framing the erotic through the lens of ritual intensity, the show challenges the viewer to look past the surface of the performance. It presents a world where humor and lamentation coexist, and where the boundaries of the self are constantly tested against the weight of heritage. This is a notable curatorial choice at a moment when much institutional programming around performance art has gravitated toward the archival — toward the preservation and re-staging of canonical works. The Gropius Bau exhibition appears to push in the opposite direction, treating the archive not as an endpoint but as raw material for continued transformation.
Abramović's career has always operated along this edge. From the endurance pieces of the 1970s with Ulay to the durational marathon of The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, the work has returned again and again to the question of what the body can hold and for how long. The Balkan material adds a specific cultural density to that question, grounding it in a tradition where the erotic and the sacred are not opposites but collaborators.
Whether this framing resonates beyond the art world depends in part on how audiences receive work rooted in a regional mythology that remains unfamiliar to many Western European viewers. The risk is exoticization; the potential is a richer understanding of how ritual knowledge persists in contemporary art. At Gropius Bau, the body remains Abramović's primary medium — a vessel for testing the limits of endurance and the persistence of memory. The question the exhibition leaves open is whether that vessel can carry the weight of a history that belongs to no single nation.
With reporting from ARTnews.
Source · ARTnews
