It started with a marching band, led by a severe gray-suited woman with medals pinned to her breast. Following them upstairs, you were plunged into semi-darkness—first aware only of a huge space echoing with wails, chants, music, and the sounds of stamping feet. Then, suddenly slap-bang in front of you there was a state funeral going on: a propped-up figure of the Communist leader of the former Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito on one side, while center-stage an imposing singer monumentally swathed in a black taffeta robe, with a towering felt head-dress ululated a piercing Serbian lament. The woman in the gray suit laid flowers and marched on into the darkness.
Thus, you’d transitioned into the creepily affecting world of Marina Abramović and her Balkan Erotic Epic performance. Summoning her home region’s folk rituals of sex, marriage, death, and religion, the artist is reckoning with humanity’s struggle with the forces of nature, her own inherited trauma, and very much else that feels viscerally relevant to women. It builds with a frenetic collective pulse on 13 separate stages with 70 performers for over four hours, while the audience wanders, coming face-to-face with macabre and surreal enactments—a young woman being married to a dead young man is just one of them—women throwing up their skirts and screaming as they show their vaginas to the sky, men lying face-down, humping grass.
When I caught Abramović at Roksanda Ilincic’s show at London Fashion Week, she gave me an idea of what was to come at her show. “It’s really pagan rituals from the fourth century to the 11th century, when Albanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Serbian people used vaginas and phalluses for agriculture. If there was heavy rain and crops were threatened in the village, women would go out in the fields and scare the gods to stop by showing them their vaginas,” she explained, adding with some relish, “I think it’s going to be hell with the British, because they’re not used to nudity. In our days now, with our kind of way of looking at the naked body, we see everything as pornography. But I found in this poetry.”
Indeed, there was something powerful about it—and not titillating. Abramović posited the idea of female genitalia “transformed into a divine weapon” by the ritual. But that didn’t take away the spectator’s unease about the embedding of shame in the female mind about the female body. The wailing screams of the women as they exposed themselves said all of that as well.
Ilincic had tipped me off that Abramović was about to premiere something huge with the Factory International in Manchester. She knew, because the revered performance art pioneer had asked the designer to work with her when she started planning it two years ago. “It was an incredible honor to work with such an inspirational artist as Marina,” Ilincic said, “and also with someone so witty and warm.” Abramović had wanted to gather as many people as possible with connections to Balkans countries for her vast production. Their relationship was a readymade fit. “I met Roksanda one time in Belgrade when I was on the cover of Bazaar, and I wore her clothes. And then we became friends, and she’s so talented. I would never ask anybody to do costumes who’s not from that culture,” she said. “She was my only choice. She’s done a great job, because she really understands that area. You have to have a certain amount of humor, but also the vision for it.”
Ilincic designed for 55 of the performers, “only because the others are naked,” Abramović quipped. She made the funeral singer’s spectacular voluminous look, the costumes of white-hooded figures who endlessly circled in the kolo dance on the roof of a café, and the glinting suits, embroidered with sharp mirror-shards worn by the fierce knife-dancing virgins of northern Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, women dedicated to living as men.
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Along a corridor was a trance-like scene populated by giant fringed puppets swaying maniacially in a snowscape—totems designed by mountain communities to divert blizzards—and these were also constructed by Ilincic and her team. Up high, as if standing in a church bell tower alongside the corpse of the young man she was about to symbolically marry, the bride involved in the black wedding enactment of the northern Serbian Vlach community was wearing a version of the red taffeta Roksanda dress which, poignantly, she originally designed in memory of her own father in her spring 2023 show. The interiors of its huge bell sleeves, seen from below, were formed in rose-like whorls, reminiscent of bouquets of roses left on graves, she said at the time.
In other wedding preparations, a bride’s face was being laboriously painted, yet obliterated, with a symbolic tracery of circles, while another was being “purified” by having milk poured over her for four hours. “Marina sparks important conversations about our culture, old customs, our relationship with our bodies, and how women are perceived in a male-dominated world,” Ilincic observed. “The Balkans are a landscape where history and myth overlap. It’s incredible to witness these stories resurfacing and finding parallels in the very different world we inhabit today.”
The two were born in Belgrade, although a generation apart, Abramović in 1946, to high-ranking Communist partisan heroes who brought her up in a strict regime of discipline and sexual repression. Her ironic title for the printed biography in the show programme reads: The People’s Daughter Marina Abramović. Scars like that last a lifetime—Abramović is 79 now—yet, conversely, she also credits her de-personalizing girlhood for instilling the unbreakable will and endurance that made her the artist she became. And yes: the buttoned-up anti-maternal Communist woman in the gray suit is the reincarnation of her mother, moving around, judging at every scene.
Abramović stepped into the café scene herself at one point when it was empty, save for three identical manifestations of Tito’s wife Jovanka Broz, impassive in severe black pill-box hats, black handbags, and harsh red lipstick. Wearing a black silk bias cut dress, Abramović gently raised her arms and danced to herself amongst the red and white checked tablecloths. Looking at her expression, as the dancers on the roof kept going, and the sounds from nearby and far away persisted, it dawned: Every single thing that was brought together and happening here was in the head of Marina Abramović. Epic indeed.
