On April 15, the self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art”, Marina Abramović, arrived at Gropius Bau with her new work Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition. The cross-genre project marks Abramović’s first solo exhibition in Berlin since the 1990s. It serves as both a stand-alone exhibition and a precursor to Balkan Erotic Epic, the stage adaptation of the same name to be performed at Berliner Festspiele this October. As a leading figure of performance art since the 1970s, and one of the first women to define the field, Abramović has built a career around endurance, vulnerability and the body as artistic medium. Now, months before her 80th birthday, Abramović describes the new work as “the most ambitious project of my career”.
That’s a striking claim from an artist who has already stretched the limits of performance. While many people at this stage of life retire, or at least move at a slower pace, artists often operate by different rules. For them, retirement is less a requirement than a choice. In 2023, Abramović suffered a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed her. In intensive care, she had three operations and nine blood transfusions, and spent weeks in a coma. When she emerged, she became the first ever woman to have a retrospective in the main gallery of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Balkan Erotic Epic (BEE) signals a new chapter in Abramović’s work, one that has been percolating since 2005. I had anticipated to interview Abramović ahead of the exhibition opening, however, the interview had to be cancelled due to her ill health. Instead, I had exclusive access to the exhibition programme, which features a recent conversation with Gropius Bau Director Jenny Schlenzka and Curator Agnes Gryczkowska. Abramović explained her motivation. “This is why I want to talk from this point of view – being almost 80 – to the women who are my age who stopped having sex in their 60s and earlier. I want to talk to them about this whole new discovery that I made and share with them that it’s never too late. That we have to figure out who we are, what our body is, our sexuality, and learn from that experience. I have to do this right now and I was never ready to do it earlier.”
My first introduction to Abramović’s work was through Sex and The City. In the episode, Carrie visits an art gallery in Chelsea to see an exhibition that reenacts Abramović’s The House with the Ocean View. This public living installation saw Abramović inhabiting the Sean Kelly Gallery for 12 days, living in three separate units above the gallery floor: one for sleeping, one for washing and another for sitting. Three ladders, installed with knife blades instead of rungs, created a barrier; no one could enter and Abramović couldn’t leave.
For the duration of the performance, Abramović fasted and only drank water. All of her actions, including showering naked, sleeping on a wooden bench and using the toilet, were in full view of the public. Accordingly, the gallery was open for 24 hours a day, meaning anyone could check-in on Abramović to see if she was still there at 4am and wasn’t “around the corner having a Big Mac”, as Carrie quips, unable to grasp the magnitude of the piece. Apparently, the producers of Sex and The City reached out to Abramović to appear in the episode but she declined, leaving a theatrically dishevelled looking actor to take her place.
This, for me, is going back to my own Slavic roots, my own culture. I absolutely could never do it when I was young.
I mention this because The House with the Ocean View was the first performance that Gropius Bau Director Jenny Schlenzka witnessed by Abramović. She recalls her visit to the Chelsea gallery. “You could just go there, watch her. I’m not even sure I liked it, but it definitely left a huge impression on me,” Schlenzka says. “She wasn’t a superstar back then. I mean, she was well known, but not like she is now.” Indeed, the 2010s were a huge turning point for Abramović. It was the decade in which she catapulted from a formidable figure within the art world to global celebrity status. In part, this was thanks to her 2010 retrospective The Artist is Present curated by Klaus Bisenbach at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. This exhibition exposed her body of work to new audiences, with public support from A-listers like Lady Gaga, who credits Abramović as an influence in her work. The retrospective is widely documented, notably with the 2012 film of the same name.
The Artist is Present performance piece lasted for the duration of the retrospective: 90 days. Abramović sat for a total of 736 hours and 30 minutes in the gallery at a table in front of an empty chair. She allowed anyone to sit opposite her, for any given period of time. From the 850,000 visitors, some people sat with Abramović for minutes, others for hours. Queues stretched around the museum, and people slept outside on the pavement overnight to secure a seat. It was rockstar-level pandemonium. It’s worth noting that Abramović was 63 years old at the time. Reflecting on that experience with Schlenzka, Abramović says, “What I did was so hard. Every day could be the last. Everything was incredibly difficult because I had to sit still on a chair for days on end. My legs – I was in so much pain. The pain in my back was unbearable.” Abramović’s work, due to its durational nature, often causes the artist pain and discomfort; however, that’s rarely the point.
In 1997, Abramović performed the piece Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale. She sat on top of 2,000 bloody cattle bones for four days straight, seven hours a day, attempting to scrub them clean and singing Yugoslav folk and funeral songs as maggots crawled out from the rotting cartilage. Behind her, separate video projections of her mother and father, both gallant Partisans during World War II, played in the background. A video sequence of her talking about rats while wearing a lab coat, then stripping off to dance ecstatically, naked and with a red handkerchief, played on loop.
Spectators were repulsed by the smell, but transfixed by the spectacle.
Abramović won the prestigious Golden Lion award for Best Artist at the Biennale that year. It was an important step in her career. The piece reflected Balkan mentality and war. In her memoir Walk Through Walls, she describes the mentality as, “Turbulent emotions. Volcanic. Insane. There is always war somewhere.” At the time, former Yugoslavia – Abramović’s birthplace – was in the midst of a series of civil wars. The artist describes how the stench of the rotting bones in the humid summer heat in the basement of that Italian Pavilion was akin to the stench of bodies on a battlefield. She writes, “Spectators were repulsed by the smell, but transfixed by the spectacle.”
Abramović returns to the Balkans as source material for BEE, continuing her exploration of ritual, sexuality, fertility, eroticism and death. In her memoir she writes, “In Balkan folk culture, male and female genitals have important functions in both healing and agricultural rights. In Balkan fertility rituals, I learned women openly displayed their vaginas, bottoms, breasts and menstrual blood. Men un-inhibitably displayed their bottoms, penises, engaging in masturbation and ejaculation. The field was very rich.”
The stage show arriving in Berlin is an adaptation of the immersive four-hour installation that premiered in October 2025 at Aviva Studios for Manchester’s Factory International. Composed of 13 scenes, all happening simultaneously, it involved 70 performers, including Abramović, combining dance, live music, performance, video and sound installations. Spectators were free to wander, following their own desires or being gently guided by the dramaturgy. Abramović told Factory International, “This, for me, is going back to my own Slavic roots, my own culture. I absolutely could never do it when I was young. When I was young, all I wanted to do was to leave ex-Yugoslavia and travel the world, which I did. I went to Aborigines, I went to Tibet, I went to shamans, I went to every piece of our planet. Really like a modern nomad. But now is the moment.” In 2026, BEE has been adapted for proscenium arch stages and will arrive in Berlin on October 14 for the Berliner Festspiele’s 75th anniversary, following dates in Barcelona and Bochum. The performance is three hours long, with audience members required to forfeit their devices at the door.
Co-commissioned with the Berliner Festspiele, the exhibition at the Gropius Bau reintroduces us to this cycle of new work, which includes previous incarnations of Abramović’s repertoire. Schlenzka says, “No other institution, more or less, in the world, would be able to show the performance and make an exhibition with it. And that, of course, for Marina, was very attractive.” Clearly not just another retrospective, BEE. The Exhibition, installed across 10 rooms, will separate Abramović’s work into three distinct but interconnected categories: the body as a political site, ecological cycles and the inevitability of death.
As in BEE, the exhibition begins in the atrium of Gropius Bau with an enormous video projection called Tito’s Funeral. Josip Broz Tito was the Partisan leader who resisted Nazi occupation during World War II. He governed socialist Yugoslavia for more than three decades and died on May 4, 1980. In her memoir, Abramović recounts that fateful day. She describes watching the funeral on TV and understanding that a new political regime would emerge in his absence. Tito’s funeral is considered one of the largest acts of public mourning of the 20th century. In conversation with Schlenzka, Abramović explains, “When Tito died, there was an incredible eroticism to it, because women of all ages were crying. There was this blue train going from Ljubljana through the entire country and it was just people standing there, beating themselves in the chest – especially women – and they were showing their naked breasts, saying, ‘Why did you take him and not me?’ This mourning together with so much passion was erotic.”
Sex and death are incredibly connected. This is why a central part for me in Balkan Erotic Epic is the orgy.
It’s a Southeast European tradition for a community’s sorrow to be demonstrated publicly through rhythmic movement and lamenting. Women known as Narikače are hired to mourn at funerals. It demonstrates how erotic energy – channelled through hypnotic rhythms and trance-like states – can be employed publicly to process communal loss. Abramović clarifies, “Sex and death are incredibly connected. This is why a central part for me in Balkan Erotic Epic is the orgy, which happens right on a cemetery. And this orgy has so many elements of life, death, mourning, suffering, pain, new birth, falling in love, altogether in one.”
Further in the exhibition, previous work originally performed by Abramović will be re-performed daily by a selection of new performers, all trained in the Marina Abramović Method at the Abramović Institute. The institute was set-up in 2012 to offer intense training for anyone, although it’s popular with performers, politicians and pop stars, and expands Abramović’s practice and teaching methods. According to its website, the five-day courses “reset the body and help understand one’s physical or mental limits”. In reality, that can mean fasting, cold water plunges, no devices, sleeping on hard floors and hours of meditation in different environments. Clearly not for the faint-hearted. Now trained, these performers will reenact ‘Nude with Skeleton’, a piece where a naked performer lies horizontally on the ground with a human skeleton resting on top of them. Their breathing animates the skeleton’s bones. In layman’s terms, it highlights the immediate interplay between life and death but was inspired by a Tibetan Buddhist practice, in which monks sleep next to the recently deceased to overcome the fear of death.
Elsewhere within the exhibition, morbidity switches to optimism. Set among giant phalluses and ancient fertility totems, a series of video works reimagine forgotten Balkan rituals, folklore and belief systems. ‘Fucking the Ground/Fertility Rites’ shows naked male bodies masturbating into the earth, drawing from supposed pagan fertility rites from multiple countries across the Balkans. The ritual evokes something of an orgy with the ground, using male bodies as a conductor to channel sexual energy back into Mother Nature. Abramović reflects on this research with Schlenzka: “I was interested in all these rituals from the Balkans – from Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro. In these rituals, there is a relation between the body and the universe. If you wanted the crops to grow better or the rain to stop, you would always have rituals that involved bodily or sexual aspects. I was thinking how important it is for us to rediscover this past, put it in a contemporary context and learn from it. Because we always think of anything sexual as pornography.”
There’s a lot of humour, a lot of exaggeration, satire, tongue in cheek. So even though it sounds very dark, there are always moments that are really funny.
In the video piece ‘Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain’, a group of women lift their skirts and flash their vulvas at the sky. This act, which was popular across many cultures and pre-patriarchal cults, was intended to affirm the power of the female reproductive organ. Although the ritual had been pushed to the margins, it was thought to be used to manifest abundant harvests and ward off the rain. If it sounds like there’s humour lurking within Abramović’s work, you’d be right. When asked about the arc of the exhibition, Schlenzka says, “I think what’s very important to understand in all of this, and once you see the show, I’m convinced it comes through that there’s a lot of humour, a lot of exaggeration, satire, tongue in cheek. So even though it sounds very dark, there are always moments that are really funny.”
Abramović described BEE at Factory International as “a healing project; I want to give new hope”. And perhaps she has given every ounce of energy to this work. Schlenzka reflects, “It’s been really powerful to hear an older woman with so much authority and so much experience speaking very directly and frankly about her own life experience, and how, for her, things just got better. The more honest and open she was with herself and the world, the better. I think that’s something we can all learn from.” If durational performance has always been Abramović’s medium, then Balkan Erotic Epic may be its final provocation. Not a farewell, but a culmination: sex and death entwined, ritual and spectacle collapsing into one. At nearly 80, she returns to the body once more, still testing its limits, still insisting it has more to reveal. Ahead of the BEE performance at Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Abramović triumphantly declared to the Catalonian newspaper Diara Ara, “I have been doing performance art for 60 years. This year I turn 80: I don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition runs at Gropius Bau through August 23.
