Twelve-foot sculptural erections; men furiously humping AstroTurf; vulva-baring dancers – with Balkan Erotic Epic, she’s done it again
“We always in everything see pornography,” Marina Abramović told the assembled crowd at the opening of her new immersive performance at Factory International. “But this is not pornography.” What she meant was that Balkan Erotic Epic’s highly theatrical depictions of genitals and fucking – its twelve-foot sculptural erections and its spread-open orifices, its simulated skeleton blowjobs and its furiously massaged breasts – are not all that arousing, at least in the straightforwardly sexual sense of the word. On one hand, her assertion that the show is not strictly pornographic is correct. On the other, this four-hour work serves as a showcase for approximately seventy performers of great strength, physical beauty and daring, who play out repetitive, muscular feats of endurance for a circulating audience of hundreds, and if most of these feats are not technically a turn-on, they are still electrifying enough to prompt a surge in the blood. We see pornography in everything precisely because pornography is everywhere, and this very ubiquity has stripped it of some of its impact. What Abramović has done is make sex new again by making it ancient – Balkan Erotic Epic draws on Balkan mythology, especially that which surrounds fertility and pleasure, to restore some of the act’s powerful, atavistic strangeness. The result is like suddenly seeing a sharp, three-dimensional image in the pattern of a magic eye picture, except that the image keeps changing, and instead of a magic eye picture, you are staring directly at the anus of a stranger. Here, sex is war, all screaming and bared, flashing scimitars; there, it resembles an act of remembrance, with the living making love to the dead.
For the ten or so men who spend the full four hours lying face down on AstroTurf and humping mechanically, sex becomes a humiliation ritual of sorts. “You will be angry, you will be outraged,” Abramović informs us. “You will be ashamed.” I do not remember feeling angry, nor outraged. I do remember thinking that these silent, thrusting men might have been feeling the requisite shame on my behalf. Opposite them, a troupe of young women in traditional Balkan dress were lifting up their skirts and repeatedly showing their vulvas. These performers drew a crowd, while almost nobody wanted to watch their male counterparts at work. It would be easy to assume that this disparity was for the usual entrenched sexist reasons – that women, nude and sexualised, provide an easy focus for the gaze – if it weren’t for the fact that they were brandishing their genitals like weapons, snarling and screeching at the top of their lungs. Their display recreates a Balkan dance whose original purpose was to frighten the gods, and stop the rain: it is meant to be a show of brute force, and as such, it implies that the female body is frightening not because it is filthy, but because it is formidable and wild.
On entering the space, you are met with a cacophony of sound: a funeral lament for the former Yugoslavian President, Tito; the voice of an opera singer; bare feet thundering on a stage; a brass band; furious drums; a thin, tinny recording of retro Balkan pop, which soundtracks a pregnant woman dancing in a shower of milk. The harsh screams of the vulva-baring dancers somehow rise above it all, as I suppose screams must if they are meant to be heard in the heavens. There are thirteen performances happening concurrently on thirteen sets, and each of them is inspired by another Balkan superstition. In a graveyard, naked men and women act out necrophilic sex acts; at the top of a looming gothic tower, a mannequin is dressed to resemble the corpse of a boy. Dancers act out funeral rites while grabbing at the skin of a man playing dead; girls dressed in the shards of shattered mirrors fight with knives. The point is for the viewer to be instantly disorientated, thoroughly overwhelmed, and then, once they are fully immersed in the derangement of Abramović’s vision, overcome by a kind of pagan rush of excitement, entering a primitive state of amalgamated ecstasy and terror.
Drifting through the show is a character Abramović has based on her late mother, Danica: a dark-haired beauty in a buttoned-up uniform, silently inspecting the performers and polishing the props. The real Danica, she says in her opening speech, suffered from lifelong sexual shame, and believed the act itself to be dirty and immoral. She imposed her inflexible military mindset on her daughter, who kept to a 10pm curfew until she was twenty-nine years old. About three hours into the Epic, the Danica doppelganger finds herself moved by the sound of a band. She begins at first to dance, then to strip off her clothes. Mother figures abound both in pornography and in Freudian sexual psychology, and there are few more potent or provocative archetypes to use in a show that is primarily concerned with the erotic. Abramović notes proudly that “Balkans are obsessed with love, with suffering, [and] with drama,” and one senses that all of these things also characterised her relationship with Danica. This portrayal of her mother is at once a resurrection, and an exorcism, affording her the sexual freedom she did not enjoy in life. Abramović turns eighty in November of next year, and if it makes perfect sense that an artist who has been producing work for a half-century would be interested in mounting a retrospective show, it is also obvious that here, she is looking back over her shoulder at the very fundamentals of her life. Sex and death, death and sex: the bookends of human existence, and two of Abramović’s long-term fixations. Prior to both, there is often a great deal of waiting around to see what happens: think, for instance, of the anticipatory tension immediately preceding a fuck, or of the interminable stretching-out of time that is characteristic of a hospital ward. With Balkan Erotic Epic’s impressive length, Abramović successfully edges her audience into waiting four hours for a climax – which, when it comes, is both wet and ecstatic, a profoundly joyful celebration of the power of the cunt which leaves both the flashing, howling dancers and the front row of their audience sodden with artificial rain.
As with many of her most iconic works, her Epic touches the body and the soul before it reaches the brain – another quality it has in common with pornography, yes, but also one that it shares with certain rituals of faith. A specific breed of art appreciator is drawn to Abramović as a figure: often female, often also intrigued by the comingling of the deathly and the erotic, and as likely to dress like their heroine as a fan at the concert of a popstar. We were there in force at Factory International, eager for the work, but just as eager to see her. When she emerged beforehand, it was in a light mode that was familiar from her interviews. (She is, though this is not often discussed in light of the severity and drama of her work, extremely funny – a dry, vaudevillian clown.) Later though, she walked out onto one of the sets mid-performance and sat down at a table, and a shift in the atmosphere took place. The artist was present, and her presence alone was unbearably charged. Abramović herself exists, in 2025, at a piquant intersection between death and sex, being an almost-eighty-year-old woman who defies all societal expectations by continuing to exude sensuality, even in repose. She appears more than ever like a beautiful statue, a black-clad Goddess made of marble. Her self-maintenance is as much a part of her practice as her physical work, and her continued dedication to looking exactly like Marina Abramović – that elegant, angular face with its smooth white cheeks, the obsidian hair that cascades past her shoulders – is a marvel. More than any other artist today, she is a star, and her stardom is the product of a one-off combination of brilliance, branding and charisma. She is fundamentally a practitioner of the flesh, and even her ongoing artistic interest in discipline and rigor seems only to enhance her apparently pure, innate connection to the primal.
This kinship with the old world and the earth is why writing about her so often resorts to invocations of witchcraft and magic. How else, though, to describe her effect on her audience? How to rationalise the fact that her stillness is simply more enthralling than other people’s stillness – that the sight of her sitting in silence, hardly seeming to breathe, is so thrilling in its quietude that it cancels out the din in the room? The answer has something to do with her vitality, which seems at all times to be threatening to breach its containment, like an animal pacing in a zoo. “I am showing to you my guts,” she explained at the start of the show. She is showing us everything, even if this time she is not the one disrobing: her guts, her heart, her psyche, the ravenous tiger in the cage of her breast. To make a transgressive, baldly sexual work of such scale at this stage in her career could have been a disaster, and yet she successfully sidesteps the risk of not having her finger on the pulse by virtue of always having had it on the most continuous pulse of them all: that of life itself, sex itself, and the universal forces of – as she herself puts it – love and suffering and drama. What could be more epic than that?
Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norfolk. Her latest book is It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (2025)
