Marina Abramović’s ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’ Is Her Most Ambitious Performance Yet

We enter Balkan Erotic Epic on the tail of a funeral procession. The funeral is for Josip Broz Tito, the president of communist Yugoslavia, who ruled the country until his death in 1980. The procession is led by performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz, embodying Marina Abramović’s mother, Danica. In a double-breasted military suit and carrying a tight bouquet of red carnations, she is a figure of pride and discipline.

Parents seem inevitably to pop up as we get deeper into our relationship with sex – it always goes back to mummies and daddies, their repressions and taboos. But Balkan Erotic Epic, at Aviva Studios in Manchester, can’t be reduced to a Freudian interpretation (despite the presence of 5.5-metre-high penises in the space). Instead, it’s a reclamation, reinvention and perversion of personal and collective history, mythology and identity. Or, as Abramović put it in her introductory speech, a representation of ‘my heart, my guts’.

Upon entry, we are confronted with a wall of mourners – an enormous screen filled with the faces of black-clad women pounding their chests rhythmically, drawing on the Balkan tradition of narikače, women who were paid to express exaggerated grief at funerals. Behind this first screen, another scene unfolds: women are trying to scare the gods into stopping the rain by flashing their vulvas towards the ground and sky. They lift their heavy skirts and scream, fall to the ground and spread their legs wide open. Behind them, a forest of supersized phalluses loom as naked men hump the ground, evoking an ancient fertility rite. Welcome to the depths of the Balkan subconscious.  

The space is vast, and the scenes are arranged in the dark. On a raised platform in the centre of the space, a group of men and women enact a black wedding, a ritual originating in the Vlach community of eastern Serbia in which a deceased young man is symbolically married to a living young woman. On the rooftop of the kafana, a Balkan-style coffee bar, dancers lock arms in a traditional circle dance, the kolo. At a sprawling cemetery, naked women embrace skeletons of their deceased lovers. Altogether, there are 13 acts, all based on authentic rituals and traditions from the region; viewers are free to roam the space, becoming intimately cocooned in one part of it or taking in several layers at once. Sonically, songs, chants, stories, heavy steps, bodies falling and moans overlap, blending into an orgy of dancing, grieving, screaming, desiring bodies.

In 1997, Abramović received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her performance Balkan Baroque, in which she sat for four days, scrubbing bloody cow bones while singing folk songs from her childhood. She represented Yugoslavia, a country that would soon cease to exist as wars tore the region apart. What did ‘Balkan’ mean then as a word? And what does it mean today? Encompassing the cultures of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and part of Greece and Turkey, as well as the countries of former Yugoslavia – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia – it still stands for a vague, mythical fringe of Europe, an enticing curiosity, one presumed war-torn, superstitious and wild. Balkan Erotic Epic indulges these expectations; it dances on the knife-edge of otherness and universality, welcoming the outsider gaze. It unfolds the epic parts of the region’s tradition while also playing unapologetically with the camp, the silly and the absurd.

In her excavation of personal history, Abramović often talks about her relationship with her mother – a model citizen and partisan war hero – and how she was shaped by her strict and ideologically driven upbringing. Sex was considered dirty, and a curfew of 10pm was enforced in the household, which Abramović followed until the age of 29. I myself come from two generations of women who lived under communism, and I could see echoes of this culture of completely repressing the erotic within the performance. The erotic is about individual pleasure, yes, but also bodily autonomy – the worst enemy of the authoritarian system. It’s curious that here, the erotic is less about personal fulfilment than pure life force, primal and collective. Still, we see Danica undergoing a personal sexual transformation, finally stripping away her restrictive uniform while dancing at the kafana, opening herself to touch.  

But while Abramović’s work goes against the repression of the erotic in the authoritarian past, it also rejects how it is treated in the capitalist present. The body in Balkan Erotic Epic is liberated both from the commercial performance of sexuality and from its censorship across social media. I spend some time watching the women baring their genitals, their faces distorted in screams of frustration, joy, anger and confusion. With phones locked away in designated pouches, you are freed from the constant pull of compulsive documentation and online presence. As water pours on the performers from imaginary skies, it feels therapeutic.    

Balkan Erotic Epic lasts four hours, and through repetition, an emotional arc gradually emerges that subtly carries you upwards. Twice, tears well in my eyes, seemingly out of nowhere. There is a quiet pleasure in seeing Abramović herself in this setting – within her own epic. At one point, she dances in the kafana while her mother figure is engaged in another scene; they are so close, in direct sight of each other, dissolving distance, sharing space. After all, this is what the body here is for: rewriting history, collapsing time.

Balkan Erotic Epic is on at Aviva Studios until 19 October. 

_{Main image: Gabriella Lemma, JP Hon, Nicole Nevitt and Kibrea Carmichael in Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic. Photo: Marco Anelli}