In Balkan Erotic Epic, Marina Abramović orchestrates a radical convergence of ancestral ritual, sexual archetype, and theatrical maximalism to exorcise the psychic residues of Yugoslavia and her own biography, forging a new artistic genre at the intersection of opera, installation, performance, and visual delirium; staged in the Gran Teatre del Liceu and running nearly four hours with 70 performers and strict no-phone policies, the work presents hyperreal genitalia, folkloric eroticism, and pre-Christian Balkan mythologies as materials for spiritual invocation and historical reckoning; rooted in Slavic fatalism and Eros as metaphysics, Abramović reclaims obscured rituals such as women exposing their genitals to halt storms, reframing them not as obscenity but sacred gestures of cosmological resistance, defying Western moral panic and the pornographic gaze; the piece unfolds across thirteen surreal tableaux—first tested in Manchester’s Aviva Studios—fusing drum & bass, electronic ambient, animated projections, and raw nudity into a dense, immersive procession where past and body blur, culminating in a cathartic reimagination of her authoritarian mother, transformed onstage into a jubilant, naked figure liberated by pleasure and voice; this transmutation of personal trauma into collective archetype draws a spectral line from Balkan Baroque (1997) to the present: once she scraped blood from cow bones, now she resurrects repressed eros as a topology of healing; Balkan Erotic Epic is neither opera nor pure performance, but an erotic-political exorcism that renders visible the gendered violence, postwar fragmentation, and mystical energies of a region haunted by absence; at nearly 80, Abramović no longer seeks permission—she ritualises taboo, creating an aesthetic language that collapses time, repurposes shame, and stages carnal knowledge as sovereign ontology, offering viewers not entertainment but a participatory spell cast in meat, memory, and myth.
