Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition

In spring 2026, Gropius Bau presents Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition by Marina Abramović, a leading figure in contemporary art. Installed across ten rooms, the atrium and the in-house restaurant Beba, the exhibition showcases what the performance artist herself has described as “the most ambitious work of my career”.

Presented in a version adapted for the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, the cross-genre project comprises two parts: the exhibition at Gropius Bau and a four-hour stage production that will open the Performing Arts Season at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele this October.

Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition is Marina Abramović’s first major show in Berlin since the 1990s, juxtaposing historic works with new video installations. It explores how the artist uses the body as a vital force to confront political systems, histories and mythologies of the Balkan countries. Bringing together works from the 1970s to today, Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition traces several key themes in Abramović’s oeuvre: rituals, the history of the Balkans and the connection between eroticism and death.

“It’s really simple. All energy we have in our bodies is sexual energy. We can use it for creativity, for 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 organized in a different society based on rituals.”

— Marina Abramović 

Balkan Erotic Epic, the wide-ranging body of work that gives the exhibition its title, was begun in 2005, when the artist shot a series of videos in Serbia featuring actors from the adult film industry. The work is inspired by regional folk tales and songs recounting ancient rituals rooted in the belief that a person’s sexual organs and bodily fluids can positively influence everyday life. Throughout her career, Abramović has been captivated by pagan rituals and the way the human body performs not as something private or carnal, but as a shared resource, a means for communities to collectively confront death, ensure fertility and restore balance within the natural world.

Two decades later, in 2025, she decided to revisit Balkan Erotic Epic and bring it back to life in various forms. In Berlin, in addition to the exhibition at Gropius Bau, a four-hour stage version will be presented at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in October 2026. In this expansive new work, the artist ironically and provocatively plays with myths both within and about the Balkan region and its communities.

Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition draws attention to the often overlooked humorous and joyful dimensions of the artist’s work, opening new perspectives on some of her oeuvre’s recurring themes. Unfolding across three thematic chapters, the exhibition explores the erotic in Abramović's work in the context of political resistance, ecological cycles and the inevitability of death.

Unfolding across three thematic chapters, the exhibition explores the erotic in Abramović's work in the context of political resistance, ecological cycles and the inevitability of death. The show opens with the ambitious new work Tito’s Funeral (2025), installed in the Gropius Bau’s atrium, which is open to the public free of charge. The video, projected onto an enormous screen, revisits the funeral of Josip Broz Tito, the Partisan leader who resisted Nazi occupation during World War II and later governed socialist Yugoslavia for more than three decades. Broadcast across the world, Tito’s funeral was one of the largest public acts of mourning of the 20th century, with crowds filling the streets to express their collective grief and anxiety about an uncertain future.

Tito’s Funeral draws a connection between this 20th-century moment of mass public mourning and a Southeast European tradition in which a community’s sorrow is channelled publicly through the rhythmic movement and wailing of women hired to mourn at funerals. In the video, rows of black-clad women beat their chests to mourn Tito’s death. The rhythm of their collective beating creates a trance-like state and an increasing sexual tension. Here, the body becomes a site of social and political rapture, its erotic energy used as a means of processing communal loss and connecting a specific moment in the region’s history with vernacular practices.

“Rituals help you to get access to a certain kind of energy. Some of them go on for days and hours on end, so you get into a state of trance. The moment your brain stops thinking, the body can have its own wisdom.”

— Marina Abramović

Also located in the atrium is the installation Kafana (2025), which evokes the atmosphere of a traditional tavern found throughout many Balkan countries. Particularly during Yugoslav socialism, kafane offered a temporary escape from everyday routines and constraints, making them vital social gathering places. The installation invites visitors to take a seat at the tables with checkered tablecloths beneath a portrait of Tito.

The first object on display in the galleries is a small figurine on loan from the Archaeological Museum of the Republic of North Macedonia, dated to the end of the 6th century BCE and excavated in the region in 2021. In different ancient belief systems, figurines of this kind, depicting a lower abdomen and resembling a vulva, were used in a wide range of polytheistic ritual practices across the Balkan region, placing the sexual organ at the centre of their cosmology. The positioning of the figurine at the beginning of the exhibition sets the tone for what follows, embodying a central concern of Abramović’s work: the translation of ancient beliefs and ritual forms into a contemporary context.

In Magic Potions (2025), a performer dressed like a scientist introduces visitors to several of these rituals. Standing in a forest of enormous phallic mushrooms, they present their research, painting a picture of sexually charged practices of the Balkan region, which are showcased through a series of animated videos: men humping grass to boost crop yield; women flashing their vulvas to stop the rain and preparing love potions that include bodily fluids. Reminiscent of a time when sexual organs were seen as symbols of cosmic energy, these gestures, which might now be considered taboo, were once understood as expressions of the connection between human desire, fertility and the cycles of nature.
By introducing the figure of the scientist, the artist also pokes fun at the ethnographic Western gaze, which has long depicted residents of the Balkan region as Europe’s less evolved “Other”. In these works, Abramović reclaims the spiritual and ecological possibilities of embodied knowledge, so long dismissed within the framework of Western science.

The exhibition includes several live performances. A re-performance of Nude with Skeleton (2002/2026), which in its original version was performed by Abramović herself, originally performed by the artist herself in 2002, is enacted daily from 14:00 to 18:00. In this piece, a naked, breathing body animates the inert limbs of a skeleton, underscoring the intimate, physical proximity of life and death. The exhibition opening will be accompanied by the enactment of a scenes from a 2025 installation of Balkan Erotic Epic: a lament by renowned Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić, which activates the central video installation in the atrium, Tito’s Funeral.

Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition places the artist’s current body of work in dialogue with earlier pieces, including Rhythm 5 (1974), Lips of Thomas (1975/2005) and Spirit Cooking (1996). This combination allows Abramović’s latest artworks to be viewed within a longer artistic history, revealing the evolution of several of her recurring themes: the treatment of the erotic as a spiritual, communal and sociocritical power; perspectives on the contradictions of Yugoslavian socialism; Balkan social history; folklore and mythology. “Even though it’s dark, and there’s death, the new work is life-affirming,” says Gropius Bau Director Jenny Schlenzka. “And there’s more of a tongue-in-cheek element. Humour has long been present in Abramović’s work, but now it’s more pronounced. She’s turning 80 this year, and yet here she is, completely reinventing the way she does performance.”

Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, curator and writer, and Jenny Schlenzka, Director, Gropius Bau, with Elena Franziska Setzer, Assistant Curator, Gropius Bau, and Savannah Thümler, Curatorial Assistant, Gropius Bau
Exhibition Management: Katharina Heise, Sophie Winckler and Nora Bergbreiter, Project Management

About the Artist

Marina Abramović is a conceptual and performance artist. Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, she has pioneered performance as a visual art form. In 2012, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art that focuses on performance and the use of the “Abramović Method”. MAI is a platform for immaterial and durational works.

It creates new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. Abramović was one of the first performance artists to become formally accepted by the institutional museum world, with major solo shows throughout Europe, the US and China. In 2025, she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association.

About the Accompanying Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication On the Erotic, featuring an interview with the artist alongside texts by curator Agnes Gryczkowska, Audre Lorde, Svetlana Racanović, Silvia Federici, Mithu M. Sanyal, Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle. The book is part of Gropius Bau’s new series The Practice – What Moves Artists, conceived and edited by Jenny Schlenzka and Julia Grosse. The series invites artists to reflect on a practice that has shaped their work, influenced their thinking or accompanied them over an extended period. In the 128-page volume, Abramović discusses female sexuality after menopause, the eroticism of the masses and her love for the planet. Accompanying texts explore the politics of eroticism, the eco-sex movement and the symbolism of the vulva.