Eight years prior to - Balkan Erotic Epic
, Marina Abramovic was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her video installation-performance - Balkan Baroque
. In that piece, the Serbian artist took explicit position against the hubris and horror of wars, pointing particularly at the Yugoslav armed conflicts that were still raging at the time (1991-2001).

After the descent into the realms of Thanatos, Abramovic surfaces and explores the complementary field of Eros and sacred sexuality within the context of traditional pagan rituals of the Balkans. Linked with fertility, virility, female desire and collective resolution of the villages' issues, those rituals, filled with symbolic acts and magical thinking, existed at least since the Middle Ages until recent times. Alongside the photo captions, the ensemble consists of seven video-installations in which the artist, dressed in traditional folk costumes, together with amateur actors reenact erotically charged mystical rites under a cloudy sky or beating rain. In Pierre Coulibeuf's 1999 full-length film on Abramovic's life and universe, she pronounces this sequence of words: “photogenic, anthropology, sex, religion, art market”. Those occurrences are reunified here to create a piece where male and female energies are expressed without restraints or inhibitions and appear intimately connected to the land.

Considering how affected she was by the destructive ethnic wars between Bosnian, Croat and Serb, it is no coincidence that Abramovic brings back to life past creative collective rites from this region. Thus, throughout history and in its many different forms, trance has provided cathartic benevolent curing effects and a protection against violence outbursts.

KS