Marina Abramović: a life of sensuality, death and the will to live
In Berlin, the Serbian artist’s exhibition explores themes ranging from melancholy over the break-up of Yugoslavia to sensuality and Balkan traditions
You either love it or hate it. But you go through it anyway, experiencing it. And love for Marina Abramović wins out: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition — the artist’s first solo exhibition in Berlin since 1990 — has been extended until 30 August due to huge public demand. In October 2026, a four-hour stage adaptation will also be staged at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.
Abramović gets it spot on, both in terms of timing and approach: a perfectly packaged product, capable of making an impact and dividing opinion. A success, however you look at it. This time, however, there is one detail that invites an almost inevitable comparison: Gabriele Stötzer, a leading figure in the women’s resistance movement in East Berlin — who has herself been the subject of a major retrospective at the Gropius Bau in recent months — also lives in the same building in Berlin where the Serbian artist resides. A proximity which, almost instinctively, sheds new light on Abramović’s exhibition, accentuating its magnificence and theatrical presence.
Tito’s Funeral: the body as collective mourning
The exhibition opens with an immediate impact: the video installation Tito’s Funeral occupies the entire central courtyard with images, moving slowly and imperceptibly, of the ‘Narikače’ — the traditional Balkan mourners, historically charged with giving voice to collective grief — as they beat their chests, weeping over the death of Tito, the marshal who led socialist Yugoslavia from the post-war period until his death in 1980, an event that foreshadowed the country’s dissolution a decade later amidst the conflicts of the 1990s. The muffled rhythm of that collective beating creates an almost hypnotic state, in which the tension becomes charged with an ambiguous sexual energy. The body becomes a site of social and political ecstasy, and erotic energy a means of coming to terms with a historical loss.
The installation highlights the extent to which the trauma of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the figure of Tito and the memory of the Balkans continue to permeate the artist’s work, as he returns to his roots through the customs, myths and pagan beliefs of various countries in the region. Here, eroticism becomes a tool with which…
Through these practices, communities come to terms with death, ensure fertility and restore balance to the natural world.
