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More than two hours passed before I surrendered to the plush black turf underfoot, slumping down against the towering penises rooted in a grove between two performances of Sisyphean end zone celebrations. One stage, entitled “Fucking the Ground/Fertility Rites,” featured five weary, wiry naked men joylessly thrusting into grassy hillocks with the intention of fertilizing the barren soil. A field opposite them, “Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain,” served as a showcase for a melting pot of Balkan maiden-attired gymnasts of all ages, wearing anguished faces ranging from raging Maori war cry to the teary trepidation of a young Amy Adams. All of them repeated their skirt-hiking rite, jumping and collapsing, contorting and thrusting, while exposing their sex, undress rehearsals for an anti-raindance, a stormy showdown with the heavens above.
That final confrontation is one of two climaxes, one fable, one personal, anchoring Marina Abramovic’s latest work, Balkan Erotic Epic. Performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz is cast in the role of Abramovic’s late unloving mother, decorated Yugoslavia People’s Army officer Danica Rosic. Here, she navigates her daughter’s tortured psyche, manifested as thirteen stages of Balkan folklore rooted in love, marriage, death, sex and power, dated from medieval times through the Cold War and interpreted in film, animation, music, dancing and milk bathing. The four-hour performance continues long after Danica succumbs to the sexual liberation Abramovic impresses upon her mother’s spirit.
I couldn’t check my phone to be sure of what time I finally settled in among the cross-legged and collapsed—ticket holders were required to lock their phones in a pouch before entering the Warehouse at Aviva Studios, where Balkan Erotic Epic premiered in Manchester this October ahead of Frieze London. The North American premiere will take place at New York’s Park Avenue Armory next December.
Support staff had two jobs. One, spot-checking guests to ensure their phones were locked up and two, making sure no audience members encroached on the steps leading to “The Kafana Complex,” an open-plan “pub, restaurant, music venue and public living room,” where avatars of the late Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito’s grieving widow, all of them resembling a caricature of Abramovic if she were drawn by The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, sat emotionally unmoved and physically paralyzed, clutching their handbags.
There’s no ambiguity about what will eventually take place here before the night is over; the program promises Rosic will find a release she never found in life. “My mother was extremely difficult,” Abramovic told the assembled audience ahead of the performance. “I was forty years old and I asked her, “why do you never kiss me?” She said, “why should I kiss you? I would spoil you.” She wanted to make a warrior of me. She never felt emotions, love, sexual desire. I need to liberate my mother from all this so I can move on after this piece with a different part of my life.”
The problem here, in this show where women whose natural eroticism was trapped across time in ritual, is Abramovic commits her mother to the same fate. No woman here knows liberation and the sexual liberation Abramovic imposes upon her is nonconsensual, an analog Black Mirror moment that brings to mind a new A.I. app that’s made headlines this week—2Wai—which allows for users to record themselves, submitting their voice and body to create a virtual avatar that can be used in the future, per the company’s own example, for a deceased grandmother to speak to their grandchildren. If we wonder what nefarious end these avatars might meet, we only look to Abramovic exposing her mother to endless looping eroticism she chose not to experience in real life.
“No phone,” ushers would shrug when I inquired about the time, before I caught one sporting a wristwatch. She informed me I still had another hour and a half to go before a sudden rainfall started then stopped, after succumbing to the fearsome power of women’s bodies. However, the audience seemed eager to move on. Hundreds of attendees peeled off before the night was over, treating the show as more of a gallery space than a performance space despite Abramovic doing her best ahead of time to assure the conclusion was worth the wait.
“Wait for the rain,” Abramovic said. The night began with the artist occupying a stage in the Aviva lobby, reading the audience into the performance, a cheat sheet for those who didn’t spring for the cost of the program despite the attendees picking bare the gift shop walls of assorted merch—aprons, throw pillows—that didn’t always give the correct impression of a show about Balkan folklore nor embody its intended themes. One bestselling tee shirt featured a program illustration of Abramovic flying on a bridled winged penis, but the show feels devoid of triumph. The show only demonstrates that ritual wears down men and women alike.
“Six pounds for a program is too high a price—it’s not my fault,” Abramovic acknowledged during her pep rally. “I’ll take a look at it, because it’s important for you to see each ritual and what it means. We’re showing thirteen different moments in this space, like thirteen children giving birth at the same time.” And she wasn’t kidding. “A friend told me the other day, you create space that looks like Balkan and smells like Balkan—that’s a big compliment.”
Balkan Erotic Epic won’t always be staged like this however, nor was it intended to be, according to Aviva Studios’ artistic director John McGrath. “[Marina] came to the press night for Free Your Mind,” he told Observer, referring to Manchester native son Danny Boyle’s 2023 modern dance interpretation of The Matrix, which opened Aviva Studios’ inaugural season. “But she’d been looking at the venue even earlier. We’d been in conversation since she visited during the 2019 Manchester International Festival and it was in 2022 or 2023 that she shared Balkan Erotic Epic as a broad idea.”
At that time, McGrath said, Abramovic imagined a seated show. She had just completed The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas on opera stages and considered continuing to explore that format. But after hosting a spring 2023 workshop in Manchester, the scenes evolved, exiting Aviva’s theater for its Warehouse space. In the future, a sequential stage version is planned for Barcelona, while performances in Germany and in New York will receive the multi-stage Manchester production.
Those performances will likely have one site-specific element that defines them. Here, performance artist Elke Luyten plays a Flemish anthropologist outfitted in a white lab coat. She silently holds court in erection alley before intermittently sharing her own takes on “Balkan Magic” while seemingly ad-libbing takes on Manchester’s weather, environment and population.
“She doesn’t understand shit about Balkan and she is confused,” Abramovic said of the character, comic relief breaking up the trauma of a nearby grieving bride tasked to marry a dead groom, a mourning dance at times set to opera and instruments that proves the most emotionally and physically taxing of the thirteen performances.
Luyten’s performance meanwhile had the effect of an alarm clock blaring news radio, interrupting Abramovic’s dream with a reminder of when and where we are. She’s trying to wake up Abramovic—a bit player here, coming and going from the pub stage at her leisure—to the reality her mother is dead and this self-flagellating dream of closer intimacy with her mother is long beyond her reach. At the same time, Luyten doubles as a high art Krusty the Klown, ending her insights with the introduction of erotic cartoons.
“The only way to show certain rituals we couldn’t show any other way is animation,” Abramovic explained. “There is no other way to show in our present time with all the restrictions we have in our society.” It’s a statement that comes across as lazy and dishonest.
Animations included recipes for love potions and sexual healing (e.g., the 14th C. Bosnian ritual, “Wedding Day Protection,” in which a man makes three holes in a bridge and penetrates them to ensure he won’t be impotent on his wedding day). It’s an act no more scandalous to recreate than the naked men fertilizing the soil feet away from me. If others come closer to the definition of pornography, that doesn’t preclude the possibility of capturing performers on film. Balkan Erotic Epic also includes a cinematic component, including a wall-length choir of nude men maintaining various states of erection while singing.
The 12th C. Macedonian ritual “Child Delivery” involves a man crossing his erect penis over his wife’s breasts to ease the pain of her childbirth, while a 15th C. Serbian “Love Potion” involves a recipe consisting of hairs extracted from forehead, eyebrow, armpit, nipple and vagina then mixed with menstrual blood and the prick of a woman’s ring finger. A 15th C. Kosovan act of “War Strategy” involves undressing and masturbating before enemy soldiers.
“Everything was created in Manchester, filmed in Manchester, shown in Manchester and one thing about Manchester that’s very important—you’re the bravest, you show new things you can’t show anywhere else in the world. I don’t know if we will finish in prison or in daylight,” Abramovic said with some exaggeration.
Maybe she didn’t know where to look. Balkan Erotic Epic proved the highlight of Frieze London was in Manchester, but the roles are reversed this weekend, when London’s Barbican Centre hosts Dirty Weekend, an adults-only weekend of sexual liberation and community outreach, all-gender speed dating and fashion workshops, in conjunction with their new fashion exhibition “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” which runs through January 25, 2026. The looks on display, from Alexander McQueen to Michaela Stark, focus on aesthetics impacted by the natural grime of earth and our own bodies. You can even make your own tee shirt.
When I first saw the animations in Balkan Erotic Epic, I immediately thought it a missed opportunity for Abramovic to partner with Four Chambers, U.K. porn performer, producer, director and sex worker advocate Vex Ashley’s decade-old video project that straddles art porn with A24 aesthetics, prioritizes female empowerment and has on occasion been more forthright in pushing the boundaries between sex and maternity than Abramovic’s Freudian wish fulfillment, an artist statement-cum-fetish to unburden herself of some childhood longing to glimpse her parents through a crack in the bedroom door.
In Four Chambers’ latest film, Some Reddish Work, which premiered earlier this month, maidens dressed not dissimilar to the raindancers showed just how well they would have embodied the Balkan Erotic Epic universe. And for their effort, they aren’t shut out of legitimate art spaces but prove a draw. Their participation in the Barbican’s Dirty Weekend this November 29-30 promises to bring their “living archive that blurs cinema, performance, sexuality and fine art,” and Ashley will participate in a keynote panel on intimacy and censorship. Here, only the debate is animated.
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Adam Robb
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