There is a scene in the 2005 video installation where women lift their skirts to the sky, baring themselves to stop a storm. The gesture is apotropaic — an ancient Balkan folk belief that female genitalia could frighten away bad weather, scare the gods into retreat. It reads, on first encounter, as absurd. On second encounter, as radical. On third, as something a machine processing thousands of cultural references can trace across civilisations but never fully understand in the body.

Twenty years later, Marina Abramović has turned that gesture into a four-hour durational epic with over seventy performers, and now it is coming to Berlin.

Balkan Erotic Epic opens at Gropius Bau on 15 April 2026 as part of the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele. The work, which premiered at Factory International's Aviva Studios in Manchester in October 2025 before travelling to Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, represents what Abramović herself calls the most ambitious work of her career. For an artist who once lay at the centre of a burning star-shaped wooden frame until she lost consciousness, who walked halfway along the Great Wall of China to end a relationship, who sat motionless in a chair at MoMA for 736 hours while strangers wept in front of her — "most ambitious" is not a phrase to deploy lightly.

The original Balkan Erotic Epic was a multi-channel video installation first shown at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York in 2005-2006. It was intimate, screen-based, a series of staged re-enactments of Balkan folk rituals rooted in sexuality and spirituality. The footage was shot in Belgrade with local performers. The academic literature around it — and there is a substantial body, particularly in journals dealing with Balkan identity, diaspora, and the politics of self-representation — fixates on Abramović's dual position: the international art-world figure who left Yugoslavia in 1976, and the Serbian artist who periodically returns to mine her origins. The tension is productive and unresolved. She is simultaneously insider and outsider, ethnographer and subject, high priestess and exile.

This tension crystallised earlier in Balkan Baroque, the 1997 Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner, where Abramović sat on a heap of cow bones for four days, scrubbing them clean while singing folk songs — a piece made during the Yugoslav Wars that refused to explain itself but made the body a site of historical reckoning. The trajectory from Balkan Baroque through the 2005 video work to the 2025-2026 live performance describes an artist circling the same territory with increasing scale and ambition: Balkan myth, ritual, the body as archive, eroticism as something sacred rather than pornographic.

"In our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography," Abramović has said repeatedly in press around this production. "This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality, in relationship to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence." The statement is rehearsed to the point of being load-bearing infrastructure — it has appeared, nearly verbatim, in every press release and interview since the Manchester premiere. But the work itself, by all accounts, is anything but rehearsed.

The Berlin staging will feature a cast of more than thirty performers — scaled down from over seventy in Manchester, though the exact configuration for Gropius Bau has not been confirmed in detail. Audiences move freely through a sequence of immersive scenes, each functioning as what one Spanish critic described as "a station in a deeply atavistic liturgical itinerary." There is a fertility rite. There is a scene called Massaging the Breast. There is Scaring the Gods — the storm-banishing ritual. There is a funerary wedding, where a living bride is married to a dead groom, a tradition documented across several Balkan cultures. There is a knife dance performed by burrneshas, Albanian women who swear chastity and assume male social roles. There is a kafana scene — the Balkan tavern — where historical enemies dance together. There is, inevitably, a giant orgy. There is a mushroom garden populated by fake phalluses. Phones are confiscated at the door.

The score is by Marko Nikodijević, who blends electronica with medieval ceremonial chants — a combination that, on paper, could tip into the portentous, but which reportedly anchors the work's temporal ambiguity: ancient and contemporary, liturgical and club. Choreography by Blenard Azizaj incorporates traditional Balkan dance forms pushed to extremes. Costumes by Roksanda Ilincic — a Serbian-born, London-based fashion designer — were chosen specifically because Ilincic shares the cultural context. "You can't put someone in those costumes who's not from that culture," Abramović has stated. Animations by the Spanish artist Sonia Alcón, along with pre-filmed video sequences on surrounding screens, extend the physical performance into a layered media environment.

Gropius Bau is an interesting choice of vessel. The building itself is a palimpsest of German history — designed by Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden, completed in 1881 as a museum of decorative arts, nearly destroyed in the Second World War, left to rot beside the Berlin Wall, saved from demolition by the intervention of Walter Gropius, rebuilt and reopened. Its generous dimensions and high ceilings suit durational, immersive work. But there is something pointed about staging Balkan rituals — rituals from a region shaped by the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, by ethnic cleansing, by the collision of empires — in a building that sits next to the Topography of Terror, on a street where the Gestapo once had its headquarters. The geography speaks even when the programme notes do not.

The critical response to Manchester was, by Abramović's own wry admission, not what she expected. She signed a contract with Taschen to publish negative reviews that never materialised. "Now that I can afford to have bad reviews, I can't find any," she told Spanish press. Let that sit for a moment: an artist who built her reputation on transgression, commissioning a luxury art book of hostile criticism, and finding none. [~Coverage from Manchester is broadly positive across the Guardian, Dazed, Frieze, and several Spanish-language arts publications. Genuinely negative reviews are, as Abramović claims, hard to locate. Whether this reflects the work's quality or the cultural capital surrounding it is a question worth holding open~].

The question that hovers around any Abramović project at this scale is whether the institutional apparatus — the co-commissioners (Berliner Festspiele, Factory International, Park Avenue Armory, Gran Teatre del Liceu, WestK), the luxury publishing deals, the celebrity adjacency — subsumes the transgressive charge of the work itself. Can a four-hour ritual about the sacred power of exposed genitalia retain its disruptive force when it arrives trailing press releases and sponsorship logos?

Perhaps. The source material resists domestication. A woman's body bared to the sky to command the weather is not an image that sits comfortably in any institutional frame. A funerary wedding is not easily absorbed as "content." And Abramović, approaching eighty, has positioned herself not as the central body in the work but as a director, a choreographer of collective energy — what one critic called "the ambiguous role of high priestess." She is present but withdrawn, orchestrating rather than enduring. This is a significant shift for an artist whose entire legacy is built on subjecting her own body to extremity. The body as subject has become bodies, plural, anonymous, communal.

Across the last decade of European performance programming, there has been a marked turn toward the ritualistic, the durational, the communal: Tino Sehgal's constructed situations, Anne Imhof's Faust at the German Pavilion, the steady rise of immersive and participatory formats. Balkan Erotic Epic sits within this current but pushes further, drawing not from contemporary art-world precedent but from pre-modern ceremonial traditions that predate the very concept of "performance art." [~This is a pattern read across institutional programming and critical discourse since roughly 2015 — not an established art-historical thesis~]. The question is whether the work uses this material to genuinely unsettle, or whether it presents the Balkans as a reservoir of primal authenticity for a Western European audience hungry for experiences their own sanitised modernity has suppressed.

Abramović has always occupied this fault line. She cannot not occupy it. Berlin, a city that both fetishises and genuinely sustains radical artistic practice, will be the next place to test where the line falls.