Until January 30th, 2026, Marina Abramović presents Balkan Erotic Epic at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, unveiling one of the most ambitious and provocative works of her career. Rooted in Balkan folklore and staged as a monumental act of performance art, the four-hour spectacle invites audiences into a charged ritual where myth, body, and history collide.
Balkan folklore as ritual and resistance
Drawing on ancient myths, legends, and folkloric traditions of the Balkans, Balkan Erotic Epic transforms inherited cultural narratives into a visceral contemporary language. Abramović returns to the region of her childhood, revisiting a landscape shaped by mysticism, religion, and political tension. Here, folklore is not presented as nostalgia, but as a living force—raw, erotic, and unsettling—through which collective fears, desires, and contradictions surface.
Eroticism in the work functions as a symbolic tool rather than provocation for its own sake. It becomes a means of addressing power, violence, fertility, and survival, challenging social taboos and the norms that govern sexuality and the body. The Balkans emerge not merely as a geographical reference, but as a psychological and cultural terrain marked by rupture and resilience.
Performance art at an operatic scale
Positioned between dance, theatre, and performance art, Balkan Erotic Epic unfolds through a sequence of performative acts featuring a cast of more than 70 performers. Abramović abandons the intimacy of her earlier works in favour of operatic scale, allowing movement, sound, and repetition to build an immersive environment.
Music rooted in Balkan traditions amplifies the emotional intensity, while choreography oscillates between restraint and primal release. The body—central to Abramović’s practice—becomes both subject and site: a space where identity, sexuality, and political tension are inscribed and exposed.
Minimal yet charged staging places emphasis on physical presence. Lighting and spatial composition heighten the sense of ritual, blurring boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the grotesque. The result is a powerful visual narrative that resists easy interpretation and demands sustained attention.
Following her presentation of 7 Deaths of Maria Callas at the Liceu in 2023, Abramović once again transforms the historic opera house into a site of confrontation and reflection. Balkan Erotic Epic can be experienced at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, through January 30th—a final opportunity to encounter this uncompromising exploration of myth, body, and human experience.
This Marina Abramović interview captures a rare exchange with Michèle Lamy on failure as a teacher, nonverbal truth, and the necessity of fearlessness in creative life. Don’t miss it.
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ
Balkan Erotic Epic, AVIVA STUDIOS (FACTORY INTERNATIONAL), Manchester, UK, 2025
Photography by MARCO ANELLI
