Marina Abramović: ‘Everything new is always criticised’

Marina Abramović has a long history of provocation. Her 1977 performance piece Imponderabilia was shut down by local police for “obscenity” (infamously, visitors were made to squeeze between the naked artist and her then-partner, Ulay, to enter the gallery space). Organisers of her other exhibitions, including a major retrospective at London’s Royal Academy in 2023, have received death threats. She’s been called a Satanist, a witch, a practitioner of black magic, and more, and was once accused of using mind-control on Lady Gaga. She’s also one of the most striking, timeless, and interesting voices in art today. And very funny.

“I mean, this is hilarious,” she laughs. We’re watching an animation of an old Bulgarian agricultural ritual: a man undoes his trousers and rubs his genitals while caressing the balls of a bull. It’s one of several rituals that haven’t made it into Abramović’s new Balkan Erotic Epic, at Manchester’s Aviva Studios. “There are certain ones that you never can do, because of political correctness, because of the craziness of our countries as we are now,” she explains. “But in animation, you can do everything.”

That said, the “craziness” of our times hasn’t stopped her from physically reenacting many of the rituals for the exhibition. Throughout the open-plan show, viewers can walk around and observe a graveyard orgy with 40 nude performers (each with a skeleton dance partner), a woman having milk poured over her breasts for four hours straight, and a recreation of a “black wedding” between a male corpse and the most beautiful girl in his village, with costumes designed by Roksanda Ilinčić.

“We have a knife dance performed only by women,” she adds, flicking through images of the ongoing rehearsals during a lunch break. (She has soup; we share a tangerine.) “These are vicious girls. Don’t fuck with them… Then we have fertility rites, fucking the ground. Then we have the breast-massaging orgy.” Now 78, Abramović doesn’t take part in Balkan Erotic Epic herself, but directs more than 70 performers, drawing on decades of personal experience, plus the newfound input of an intimacy coordinator.

Is the content of this show – which Abramović bills as her “most ambitious” to date – going to inspire as much uproar as those in years gone by, with its erotic death dances and vaginas bared to the sky? Almost definitely. “I expect a very strong emotional response,” the artist says, especially in England. “You have such a problem with nudity,” she says. “This is ridiculous. Do you always have to get drunk to make love? This is my question to all of you.” But of course, it’s not just England where the artist’s work has stirred up controversy in the past. “Everything new is always criticised,” she adds, pointing out that all of her early artworks from the 70s were “completely destroyed in the press… and now they’re all in museums”. Here, she references a quote by Gandhi (although, apparently, it’s a common misattribution): “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Is she ever frustrated by this process of gradual, grinding acceptance? “I get used to it,” she replies. “You have to be persistent.”

Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1946, a year after the nation came under the rule of the communist leader Josip Broz Tito, which would last until his death in 1980. In the 40s, her mother and father – who had a difficult and inflammatory relationship – fought for the communist revolutionaries and later occupied positions in Tito’s government. “My father was always on a white horse,” she says. “My mother was always in double-breasted jackets. Even in nature she was wearing her suit. She could never relax.” Notably, her mother, named Danica Rosić, also believed sex was “dirty” and imposed strict rules on her daughter, including a 10pm curfew that lasted until Abramović was 29. At this point, she was already a daring and transgressive performance artist, telling an interviewer in the 90s: “It’s completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself… everything was done before 10 in the evening.”

When I left ex-Yugoslavia, I really wanted to explore every culture in the universe, live with Aboriginal people, with Tibetans, with shamans, the modern and not-modern, to see everything. Now, I’m going back.

Both Tito and Danica make an appearance in Balkan Erotic Epic. For the former, Abramović stages a monumental funeral scene. “Always, in these countries, the men are in black, the women are in black,” she says. “Always somebody died.” But this ritual is a special case, dramatising what was one of the largest funerals of all time, during which hundreds of women beat their chests in mourning. “It’s to do with death, but also life and eroticism, all together in one.” It also represents a complex blend of politics, religion, Pagan beliefs, and the kind of existential feelings that keep Abramović’s art feeling timeless across generations. Her mother, on the other hand, is depicted alive – and as conservative as ever – by the performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz. “I’m afraid of what I create,” says Abramović, on the realism of Maria’s portrayal. Does it almost feel like encountering her mother again, chastising her from beyond the grave? “Totally.”

Danica plays a vital role in the show, acting as a kind of barometer – alongside a bemused Belgian scientist who’s come to “study Balkan magic” – as things get “more and more crazy”. To begin with, Abramović explains, her mother is “absolutely repulsed” by the rituals taking place, and writes down the names of the performers. But then she herself becomes intoxicated by the music and dancing. By the end, she’s dancing naked on a table, “lost completely into this lust”. “This is what my mother could never do in her life,” she adds – but the artist can offer her a sense of liberation, at least, in death.

Abramović returns to (and confronts) her early life in this project more than ever before. “When I left ex-Yugoslavia, I really wanted to explore every culture in the universe, live with Aboriginal people, with Tibetans, with shamans, the modern and not-modern, to see everything,” she says. “Now, I’m going back.” Late next year, she will turn 80, and it’s partly this distance in time that allows her a new perspective on her formative years. Before now, she says: “I was too close, I could not see it.”

The result is a kind of “full circle moment”, but that doesn’t mean Abramović is finished – far from it. She adds: “After this, I’m free. I can do other work. But I need to go back and have peace with everything, with my mother, with my country, with all of this shit, because I have a love-hate relationship with them. There was so much that hurt me. My childhood was like the biggest nightmare.” And there are still parts of it, even now, that she can’t understand. She shows me a photo of herself and her classmates at four years old, for example: everyone else is dressed up as a princess or a soldier, but her mother has dressed her as the devil. “I have no idea why,” she says. “And look how miserable I look!”

Sexual energy is the only energy we have in our body. It can manifest in violence, in aggression, in war, or in tenderness, transformation, and love – Marina Abramović

If this is the ‘Balkan’ part of Balkan Erotic Epic – Abramović’s nightmarish childhood, Tito, and the rituals themselves, which are all based on real, historical rituals from across the Balkan region – then what about the ‘erotic’? Well, that’s everywhere, in everything, inseparable from the events of our lives, Abramović says. “Sexual energy is the only energy we have in our body. It can manifest in violence, in aggression, in war, or in tenderness, transformation, and love. This is the only energy we’re talking about, but we don’t ever actually go deep into this matter. This is why this piece is so important to me. It’s like a healing. In the middle of the mess we’re in right now, in the world, this is the right thing to do.”

It’s important to Abramović to make a distinction between the erotic and pornography (a reductive label that equates to “shitting on” the complex erotic rituals of the past). “I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering, and reflect on our mortality,” she says, anticipating the simplified judgements that will appear in the national press. “It is not pornography, it is humanity.”

Does Abramović think people have become more or less comfortable with the erotic, over the course of her life? This is a question on everyone’s mind right now, and she arguably has one of the clearest vantage points to see a shift taking place. “I think it’s a disaster,” she says. “I see the younger generation who don’t have sex any more. The young kids, their only knowledge of sex is pornography, through a screen… and they’re afraid to get emotionally involved, because they’re afraid to be hurt. But love and pain go so nicely together!”

I see the younger generation who don’t have sex any more... their only knowledge of sex is pornography, through a screen… and they’re afraid to get emotionally involved, because they’re afraid to be hurt. But love and pain go so nicely together! – Marina Abramović

Her concern about today’s sexual dynamics adds a new dimension to her complaint about “political correctness” – which isn’t, after all, the same as a middle-aged man grumbling about how ‘you can’t say anything any more’. By contrast, Abramović seems to take a much longer view of human history, to understand how politics, religion, and technology have seen us become “more and more alienated” from our fundamental desires. In part, Balkan Erotic Epic is about confronting this alienation, and returning us to a conscious relationship with our bodies and the world around us. “I hope that people reflect on their own sexuality, on their own life, their own energy,” she says. “I give you everything. You can take it, or leave it.”

Speaking of hope, how does Abramović continue to make art that feels timeless and vital, some 50 years after her earliest official performances? How does she continue to find humour and beauty in human existence, while contending with some of its darkest moments? Her response is critical and clear-eyed. “My generation stopped performing, my generation stopped thinking. They repeat themselves. They’re nowhere, or they died,” she says. “Honestly? I’m one of the few still around. It’s crazy. My only friends are half my age, because my generation irritates me with [its] constant bitterness and criticism of everything new, everything progressive. Life is a miracle, it’s wonderful. We have to be there and experience it.”

That doesn’t sound like the outlook of a cynical, corrupted Satanist, does it?

Maria Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic is on show at Aviva Studios, Manchester, from October 9 to October 19.

Marina Abramović, Artist/Director/Concept/Design, Georgine Maria-Magdalena Balk, Associate Director, Blenard Azizaj, Choreographer, Billy Zhao, Durational Performance Director, Nabil Elderkin, Film Director, Marko Nikodijević, Composer, Luka Kozlovački, Composer/Sound Designer, Urs Schönebaum, Lighting Designer, Anna Schöttl, Set Designer, Roksanda Ilinčić, Costume Designer, Sonia Alcón & Fredrik Nordbeck, Animation, Marco Anelli, Photography, Svetlana Spajić, Creative Consultant/Singer, Aleksandar Timotic, Creative Consultant/Singer, Elke Luyten, Performance Artist, Maria Stamenković Herranz (MSH), Performance Artist, Rowan Schratzberger, Assistant Choreographer, Helene Schönebaum, Assistant Set Designer, Tigger Blaze, Intimacy Coordinator, Rafi Gokay Wol, Creative Consultant/Executive Producer for Marina Abramović, Yasemin Kandemiroğlu, Creative Consultant/Producer for Marina Abramović