Balkan Baroque I

The present work is a monumental photograph relating to Marina Abramović’s legendary performance piece Balkan Baroque, created for the 1997 Venice Biennale. In this landmark spectacle, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist, Abramović sat amidst a pile of 1500 cattle bones, washing them methodically with a single rag. Wearing a long white gown, she sang plaintive folksongs from her Yugoslavian childhood, weeping intermittently as she worked. An installation of three videos – featuring the artist and her parents – played in the background, arranged like a devotional triptych. The work followed on from Abramović’s haunting performances Cleaning the House (1996) – a direct precursor involving the ritual scrubbing of beef bones – and Cleaning the Mirror (1995) in which she systematically washed a human skeleton. Together, this powerful trio of works mourned the tragedies that befell her native country throughout the 1990s: notably the Croatian War of Independence, as well as the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. Weaving together personal and global narratives, Balkan Baroque stands today among Abramović’s most important meditations on the themes of ceremony and destruction that lie at the heart of her practice.