“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.
2025/2026
Part of the series Balkan Erotic Epic
Portrait of Tito, tables, chairs, tablecloths, string of lights
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives and Factory International, Manchester
This installation recalls the typical interior of a kafana, a tavern common in several countries across the Balkans since the 17th century. Derived from the Turkish term for coffeehouse, kahvehane, the kafane bear witness to the region’s Ottoman influences. Ever since, they have played a key social role, fostering communal bonds and offering a temporary escape from everyday routines and social expectations. Fueled by folkloric live music, the atmosphere is often exuberant.
A performance during the exhibition opening reenacted traditional kafana culture. The staging of Jovanka Broz as Tito’s mourning widow served as a symbol of the rise and fall of socialist Yugoslavia. Broz fought in Tito’s anti-fascist partisan army in the 1940s and gained international recognition in the 1950s and 1960s as the elegant and diplomatic First Lady of Yugoslavia.
2025
Part of the series Balkan Erotic Epic
Video, colour, sound, 20 minutes
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives and Factory International, Manchester
In this video work, Abramović engages with belief systems, myths and folklore across cultures and eras, such as the legend of Baubo and Demeter, Greek goddess of harvest and fertility, as well as the Japanese Shintō goddess of dawn, joy and festivity, Ame-no-Uzume. In all these stories, the protagonists lift their skirts to expose their naked vulva. In many pre-patriarchal cults, this gesture was ritually reenacted as an affirmation of the vulva’s vital, generative power. Although such practices were pushed to the margins with the rise of monotheism, they once helped communities face uncertainty with vitality and joy: they were thought to ensure fertility, protection and abundant harvests.
Blenard Azizaj – Choreography
Nabil Elderkin – Director
Maia Lloyd, Paul Bryan – Editor
Luka Kozlovacki – Composition
Rebecca Jonas – Producer
2025
Part of the series Balkan Erotic Epic
Video, colour, sound, 4 hours
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives and Factory International, Manchester
This video depicts naked male bodies masturbating into earth, evoking a grotesque orgy. The work draws on stories that are believed to describe pagan fertility rites in different countries across the Balkans. Abramović reimagines these tales as a communal ritual, transforming the male body into an instrument that channels Energy back into the land: a pointed satire of the patriarchal ideals associated with virility.
Blenard Azizaj – Choreography
Nabil Elderkin – Director
Maia Lloyd, Paul Bryan – Editor
Luka Kozlovacki – Composition
Rebecca Jonas – Producer
2025
Part of the series Balkan Erotic Epic
Video, colour, sound, 20 minutes
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives and Factory International, Manchester
Blenard Azizaj – Choreography
Nabil Elderkin – Director
Maia Lloyd, Paul Bryan – Editor
Luka Kozlovacki – Composition
Rebecca Jonas – Producer
2025
Part of the series Balkan Erotic Epic
Throne, costume, portrait of Tito, video, colour, sound, 4 hours
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives and Factory International, Manchester
In the opening chapter of Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition, Marina Abramović revisits Josip Broz Tito’s funeral. The charismatic communist revolutionary resisted Nazi occupation during World War II and later governed socialist Yugoslavia for over three decades. Tito’s authoritarian rule shaped an entire generation and the cult around him permeated every sphere of life. It also affected Abramović’s own upbringing in Belgrade, where her parents – decorated World War II partisans – went on to hold prominent positions within the socialist government. In 1980, Tito’s death marked not only the end of a political era but also the collapse of a multiethnic state.
Tito’s funeral, which took place in Belgrade and was broadcast around the world, became one of the largest public acts of mourning of the 20th century. Crowds filled the streets, expressing their sense of loss in the face of an uncertain future. For this new video work, Abramović combines these iconic images with traditional funeral customs practised across different Balkan countries, in which grief is manifested physically and communally. Narikače – women hired to mourn publicly – channel sorrow through lamentation and rhythmic movement, transforming loss into a transcendental state and near-erotic release. In Tito’s Funeral, Abramović engages with this historical moment of collective outpouring to reveal how death and eroticism are closely connected.
Blenard Azizaj – Choreography
Nabil Elderkin – Director
Maia Lloyd, Paul Bryan – Editor
Luka Kozlovacki – Composition
Rebecca Jonas – Producer