Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
Last week, Marina Abramović opened her first solo presentation in Berlin since the 1990s, the bombastically named, “Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition” at Gropius Bau.
Set to run through August 23, the show brings together historical and recent works, tracing her long-standing engagement with ritual, eroticism, death, and the body as a site of political and spiritual intensity. Drawing on Balkan folklore, alongside Abramović’s performance history, the exhibition moves between film, installation, sculpture, and live action to create an environment where the boundaries between individual and collective experience are continually tested. At its core, the show frames the erotic as a driving force, linking fertility, mortality, and transformation. Moments of humor sit alongside lamentation and ritual intensity, underscoring the exhibition’s refusal of a single, fixed reading.
At the packed opening, a huge screen showed Abramović’s video work, Tito’s Funeral (2025), broadcasting women beating their chests in a near trance-like state, drawing on ritualised forms of communal mourning. In front of the screen, Svetlana Spajić performed live, as a brass band procession moved through the space.
To learn more about the show, ARTnews caught up with the show’s London-based co-curator Agnes Gryczkowska over email. (Jenny Schlenzka was the show’s other co-curator and director of the museum.) The practice of Gryczkowska, who is also an art historian and writer, centers on creating Gesamtkunstwerk-like exhibitions. Her work stages dialogues between contemporary and historical narratives through a distinctly dark, interdisciplinary lens. Her recent curated exhibitions include “Au-delà” at Lafayette Anticipation in Paris and “Theatre of Cruelty” at Casino Luxembourg. She was also curator at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin and assistant curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Abramović has long used the body as both medium and message. How does “Balkan Erotic Epic: The Exhibition” extend or challenge the legacy of her earlier works, particularly in its scale and immersive structure?
Agnes Gryczkowska: “Balkan Erotic Epic: The Exhibition” extends ideas present from the beginning of Abramović’s practice, body, ritual, pain, eroticism, death, transformation, but on an expanded scale. In earlier works such as Rhythm 5 (1974) and Lips of Thomas (1975/2005), the body is solitary: her own, pushed to its limits in acts of endurance and transcendence. Here, that logic shifts outward, from the individual to the collective body, from private ordeal to shared rite. The body becomes a ritual instrument embedded in land, myth, and ancestry.
In this exhibition, that logic shifts outward—from the individual to the collective body. The body becomes a ritual instrument embedded in land, Slavic myth, and ancestry. It is still central, but no longer singular; it is multiplied, communal, and activated through collective gesture rather than individual extremity.
This expansion is rooted in Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic (2025) project, which premiered at Factory International. While that performative version combines video, live performance, sound, ritual action, and folklore into an immersive whole, the exhibition at Gropius Bau takes a different approach. It traces Abramović’s relationship to the Balkans and her understanding of eroticism across her entire oeuvre, placing this new body of work in dialogue with earlier pieces.
It’s a huge, complex show. What were the biggest challenges of curating it?
A central challenge was translating the visceral immediacy of performance into a museum context without reducing it to documentation. The question was how to preserve intensity within a more static structure while keeping the work’s full context visible, its grounding in Balkan history, Abramović’s biography, and the broader conceptual framework of eroticism.
We foregrounded the history of Yugoslavia, Tito, and Abramović’s upbringing in a highly disciplined partisan household, where collective identity and control shaped everyday life. These conditions are deeply inscribed in her work, which repeatedly returns to ideology, mourning, sacrifice, communism, ancestry, and the politics of the body.
Equally important was resisting a reductive reading of eroticism as merely explicit. Here, eroticism operates as a fundamental force. For Abramović, as well as for one of my favourite philosophers, Georges Bataille, it is tied to ecstasy, loss of control, and the dissolution of the self, and is therefore inseparable from death. Structuring the exhibition into three chapters—The Political Body, Eroticism of the Earth, and Eroticism and Death—allowed these ideas to unfold more clearly.
How did your past curatorial practice prepare you for this show, and do you share affinities with Abramović’s vision?
This exhibition brings together questions I have explored for years: ritual, pagan practices, the conjunction of death and eroticism, and human relationships to elemental forces. I have long been interested in how historical objects can enter into dialogue with contemporary work, revealing how older symbolic systems persist within the present.
The inclusion of a late Neolithic female figurine fragment from North Macedonia grounds the exhibition in deep time, underscoring the persistence of these forms. What Abramović does, and what this exhibition also attempts, is reactivate and reinterpret archaic systems and allow them to speak again in contemporary language. In that sense, there is a strong affinity between her vision and my curatorial interests; a shared engagement with ritual, with the proximity of death and eroticism, and with art’s capacity to reactivate the sacred, the bodily, and the metaphysical within contemporary experience.
The work draws heavily on Balkan folklore and ritual. How did you approach translating these practices without diluting or sensationalizing them?
It was essential to avoid treating these practices as spectacle or ethnographic curiosity. Some of them are old systems of knowledge, ways of relating the body to fertility, death, and survival.
Abramović brings her own perspective, including a crucial use of humour, which prevents the work from becoming overly solemn or sensationalised. This reflects something specific to Balkan ritual cultures, where grief, obscenity, laughter, and magic coexist. Grounding the exhibition in the political and historical realities of Yugoslavia further anchors these practices in lived experience, rather than abstraction or aestheticization
What is it like to work with Abramović on a project of this scale?
Abramović has a very clear vision, but remains remarkably open, continually curious, receptive to new ideas, and willing to take risks. That openness is rare at this stage of an artist’s career. She combines a strong, almost maternal presence with a childlike curiosity, creating a dynamic that shapes the curatorial process in meaningful ways. Working with her on this project has been deeply inspiring.
The work is notably graphic. How do you anticipate audiences navigating that intensity? Is discomfort essential?
Discomfort is essential, not as provocation, but because the work returns us to experiences contemporary culture often distances: death, erotic power, fertility, mourning, vulnerability, surrender. The exhibition embraces contradiction, images that are grotesque and sacred, humorous and terrifying, physical and metaphysical. The body is not presented as something to be consumed, but as exposed and porous. These images are not unprecedented in art history; what has changed is our relationship to them. Abramović ultimately asks us to reconsider how we look, and what we are willing to confront.
What is the significance of this being her first show in Berlin since the 1990s?
It feels significant. Berlin, shaped by division, ideology, subculture, and transformation, resonates strongly with the tensions at the heart of Balkan Erotic Epic, between East and West, communism and capitalism, and competing historical narratives.
To show her work here now feels both urgent and charged. This is not a retrospective, but a reintroduction, presenting Abramović through a new lens that foregrounds its rawness, intensity, and continued capacity to challenge.
How did you handle the responsibility of curating the show for such a seminal artist?
The challenge was translating the scale of Abramović’s thinking into a journey that a museum audience can navigate. Spending time with her, discussing the work in depth, including a week together at her legendary black five-pointed star-shaped house, was central to that process. It was an intense and unforgettable experience, and a rare opportunity to engage so closely with an artist whose work continues to evolve.
Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition, Installationsansicht, Gropius Bau, 2026
