- VENUE: Gropius Bau, Berlin
- DATES: Now open → August 23, 2026
- TAGS: Performance Art • Balkan Folklore • Feminist Breakthrough
For years, there has been a woman pushing boundaries with her body on the world’s biggest stages. However, this exhibition in Berlin brings to light her most personal, most bizarre, and perhaps most courageous layer.
When you step into Gropius Bau, what greets you is not just an exhibition—it is akin to stepping into the middle of a dark ritual. This showcase by Marina Abramović, titled Balkan Erotic Epic, casts aside the ice-cold, calculated body we have watched over the years and offers something completely different: a language distilled from the rawest, most transgressive layers of Balkan mythology.
The exhibition draws inspiration from the fertility rituals of Balkan folk traditions. Imagine: women rubbing their breasts against the soil, men raising their penises toward the sky—these are not acts of perversion, but actually forms of worship. Abramović takes these images and reconstructs them through cinematic installations, sculptures, and live performances. The result is simultaneously comical, eerie, and strikingly touching.
But the real point is this: Abramović states that the body is as political as it is erotic, and that the two cannot be separated from one another. The traces of her years growing up as a child of the Balkans are visible very clearly here. The suffering of those lands, the post-communist chaos, and the reality that Europe has always looked down upon this geography—all of this speaks from within the body.
The feature-length video installation located at the center is particularly incredible. You sit in a dark room, images rain down upon you, and you feel like both a spectator and a participant. This sensation is something only a few artists can achieve.
A note before you go: Gropius Bau has transformed into a Marina front this summer. Concurrently, the photography exhibitions of Hujar and Deschenes are also running. If you do both on the same day and finish off with a doner kebab on Cuvrystraße, that is the ideal Berlin day for me.
Exhibition Details:
- Artist: Marina Abramović
- Exhibition Title: Balkan Erotic Epic
- Venue: Gropius Bau, Berlin
- Dates: On view until August 23, 2026
