“All energy we have in our bodies is sexual energy. We can use it for creativity or spiritual matters. Or we can repress it and then it becomes aggression, war, anger and torture. It’s so interesting to see how such transformations were organised in a different society based on rituals.”
— Marina Abramović
Since the 1970s, Marina Abramović worked with her body to explore ritual, endurance and transformation. Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition brings together new and historic works that consider the erotic as a vital force through which boundaries between life and death, individual and collective, begin to dissolve. Unfolding across three chapters, the exhibition explores the erotic in the context of political resistance, ecological cycles and the inevitability of death.
Abramović’s early performances reflect her ambivalent relationship to the socialist politics of Yugoslavia. Infused with communist and Christian symbols, they expose the complexities of a system built on unity, discipline and the demand to place the collective above the individual.
Three decades later, Abramović revisits her origins through the lens of pagan customs, myths and beliefs from different countries across the Balkans – a region which encompasses several states with distinct cultural and political histories. Her work cycle Balkan Erotic Epic (2005/2025) reimagines the Balkans as a place where erotic energy functions as a means for communities to confront death, ensure fertility and restore balance within the natural world. Through deliberate exaggeration, Abramović also addresses how supposed backwardness is still projected onto the Balkans.
Across ancient traditions in the Balkans and beyond, the Earth was understood as a living body, one that could be nourished, summoned or awakened through ritual. Acts of erotic display and invocation once served as tools of survival. Gestures tied to fertility, harvest and protection linked human desire to the cycles of nature. The penis and vulva were seen as symbols of cosmic energy carried as protective charms, carved into stone or evoked in communal rites.
In her work cycle Balkan Erotic Epic, Marina Abramović returns to these rituals to reclaim the ecological and spiritual possibilities of the region’s vernacular practices. However, rather than staging authentic reenactments of these communal initiatives, she uses the grotesque and the absurd as tools to challenge social taboos deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness. While acknowledging the region’s rich cultural heritage, this restaging also challenges familiar stereotypes that have long portrayed the Balkans and its people as wild, close to nature or exceptionally virile.
The subject of death has been present in Marina Abramović’s work since the very beginning. From her early performances in the 1970s to her most recent works, she has explored how pain, endurance and eroticism push the body to its limits. In these moments of physical and emotional extremity, the artist approaches a state that borders on death, yet affirms life with renewed intensity.
In various regions across the world, annual rites of washing or tending the bones of the dead sustain a living bond with ancestors, transforming fear of mortality into an act of care. Abramović’s practice repeatedly engages with these traditions. In touching death, she considers the mortal body not as an ending, but as a threshold of transformation.
For Abramović, this intimacy with death extends into the realm of the erotic. As the philosopher Georges Bataille wrote in 1957, eroticism is the affirmation of life up to the point of to death. In this state, boundaries between self and other, pleasure and pain, begin to dissolve. In Abramović’s work, death and eroticism are revealed not as opposites, but as twin forces within the same current of existence.
Having grown up in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Marina Abramović experienced both the ideals and constraints of a system built on discipline, sacrifice and the principle of “Brotherhood and Unity”. She witnessed how a state can shape identity not only through law and ideology, but also through symbols, rituals and the collective body. Under Tito’s socialism, the red star was not an abstract idea, but was performed on the body. The symbol was worn on the chest and inscribed into public and private life through communal ceremonies.
Abramović responds by using her own body to undermine these structures through acts of endurance. Her performances expose how symbols of unity can also become instruments of control. In some works, the body appears vulnerable, even wounded; in others, it becomes powerful, erotic and defiant. Abramović’s use of nudity, blood, song and gesture reveals how deeply politics is intertwined with physical experience.