Exhibition
Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition
Marina Abramović, Women Massaging Breasts II from the series Balkan Erotic Epic, C-Print, 2005, Serbia © Marina Abramović. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives
One of the most influential performance artists of all time, Marina Abramović presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition at Gropius Bau in spring 2026. The show traces her ongoing engagement with ritual, eroticism, death and the body as a site of political resistance.
Women beat their chests and massage their breasts in lamentation, while a living naked body lies entwined with a skeleton: drawing on the folklore of Abramović’s native Balkans, the exhibition weaves together filmic and sculptural installations with live performance to explore eroticism as an offering that binds life and death, the self and the cosmos. It highlights the artist’s performances not merely as acts of personal endurance, but as imagined rituals that reposition the erotic body as carrier of spiritual, political and ecological meaning.
“All energy we have in our body is sexual energy. We can use it for creativity, for spiritual matters or it becomes aggression, war, anger.”
— Marina Abramović
Celebrating their 75th birthday, the Berliner Festspiele unfold Balkan Erotic Epic in two parts: following the exhibition at Gropius Bau, Balkan Erotic Epic. The Stage Version, a new multi-hour theatre production, will open the Performing Arts Season in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in October 2026.
Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, curator and musician, and Jenny Schlenzka, Director, Gropius Bau, with Elena Franziska Setzer, Assistant Curator, Gropius Bau, and Savannah Thümler, Curatorial Assistant, Gropius Bau