Marina Abramovic or The Artist and His Story

The artist Marina Abramovic and her place in the art world

Marina Abramović is a Serbian citizen, but her life and work as an artist took place primarily in the rest of the world when Serbia was still part of Yugoslavia. Abramović became known as a performance and action artist , creating installations and conceptual art .

The “grandmother of performance art” (a statement by a former partner whom the artist herself is said not to value very much) is more famous than almost any other artist, and not only because her illustrious career began in the 1960s and Marina Abramović has continued to conceive and present sensational new art to this day.

She has had a performance art , both as an artist and as a mentor to younger artists; her extraordinary and demanding approach to art has influenced artists of her own generation as well as those of subsequent generations. Over the past five decades, Abramović's art has undergone a series of transformations that reflect the evolution of both the artist and the person.

Marina Abramović is one of the most controversial artists of our time because there are few people who are not touched and stirred by her performances.

Her position in the art world, determined by exhibition and sales success, reflects the ambivalent relationship of international art critics to the artist Abramović: in 2005 she was listed at number 36 on the list of the world's most successful female artists, in 2006 at number 43, in 2007 she rose to number 31, in 2008 she was back at number 36, in 2009 she fell to number 40, in 2010 she climbed to number 29, in 2011 she dropped to 33, in 2012 to number 35, in 2013 to number 37, in 2014 to number 31, and currently she has fallen back to number 35 (see artfacts.net/en/artists/top100.html ).

A rapid and often zigzagging line, plummeting from upward trend back into downward, shows that not even half a dozen of the world's top 50 artists exhibit similar volatility in their art and its evaluation. Here is the story behind it, which is also the story of a society:

Marina Abramovic and Yugoslav history

Marina Abramović was born on November 30, 1946, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. A child of the post-war era, she grew up in the socialist Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia under the rule of the "paternal dictator" Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980).

And yet, a child of the post-war era, whose path to becoming an artist and her mode of expression as an artist were decisively and shockingly influenced by the past wars of her country:

Abramović's parents, Vojo Abramović and Danica Abramović, were both highly politically active and were so deeply influenced by their experiences that their daughter Marina's childhood was fundamentally shaped by the memories of what they had experienced.

Vojo Abramović, the father, was born on September 29, 1914, to poor parents in Cetinje, Montenegro. He grew up in Peć, Kosovo, joined the army, and initially rose to the rank of general. Her mother, Danica Abramović, was born in 1921, the daughter of Varnava Rosić, who served as Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church from 1930 to 1937.

However, she too became a major in the army; both her parents are said to have rejected the Christian Orthodox religion into which they were born, which doesn't sound like a warm relationship with her maternal grandfather.

Both parents, the Montenegrin and the Serbian, joined Tito's People's Liberation Army. They are said to have served in a guerrilla unit against the Croatian fascist Ustaša from 1941 to 1945, who committed genocide against Jews, Roma, and Serbs on a massive scale.

Traumatic experiences that Marina Abramović felt during her childhood and adolescence, and which are a recurring theme when it comes to the artist Marina Abramović .

Therefore, understanding the artist Marina Abramović is hardly possible without looking at the history of Serbia/Yugoslavia:

The Balkans: An eternal struggle

The present-day Republic of Serbia, located in the center of the Balkan Peninsula, has been a state since around the year 600, until about 1000 under tribal leaders called Župans. As is so often the case with states with many neighbors, the squabbling started soon after the state's founding: Around 1000, Serbia was devastated by the Hungarians and came under Byzantine rule until the middle of the 12th century.

At the end of the 12th century, Serbia rose to become a regional power under the Nemanjić dynasty; under the most powerful Serbian ruler, Tsar Dušan (1331–1355), the Serbian Empire reached its greatest political influence and extent; in 1345, Dušan became “Tsar of the Serbs and Romans” .

His successors had to defend themselves against the Turks (Ottomans) at the end of the 14th century, who wanted to incorporate the last Christian kingdom in Southeast Europe into the Byzantine Empire. In the so-called Battle of Kosovo (1389, a national myth for the Serbs), the Serbian princes were so weakened that they were effectively forced to acknowledge the supremacy of the Ottoman sultans.

Serbia was finally conquered in 1459, and since then it has fought for independence, but was only able to partially free itself from Ottoman rule in the First Serbian Uprising in 1804.

In 1813 Serbia was conquered again by the Ottomans, through the Second Serbian Uprising (1815 – 1817) it became a semi-autonomous principality, and in 1867 it was liberated from the last Ottoman regiments by Prince Mihailo Obrenović.

He solemnly consecrated Belgrade as the free Serbian capital. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the European Great Powers and Turkey recognized the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. In 1882, the Principality of Serbia was declared a kingdom. King Milan Obrenović declared war on Bulgaria in 1885 and was defeated. Only through the intervention of Austria-Hungary was the Serbian kingdom preserved in the Peace of Bucharest of 1886.

In 1912, Montenegro declared the First Balkan War on the Ottoman Empire. Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks joined the war, and the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its European possessions (Treaty of London, 1913). Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece then fought over the partition of Macedonia. With Bulgaria's attack on Serbia on July 29, 1913, the Second Balkan War began. Serbia, Greece, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire fought against Bulgaria, which lost in August 1913, and Macedonia was partitioned.

Serbia was heavily involved in the First World War "Black Hand ," a secret society with considerable influence within the Serbian government, which advocated "Greater Serbian ideologies" (such as the dismantling of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a single state for all South Slavic peoples).

When secret societies and ideologies, concepts like “dismemberment” and “one for all” are involved, all-encompassing disasters usually follow, as was the case here: The tense situation culminated after the assassination in Austria-Hungary issuing Serbia an “unacceptable ultimatum”; instead of reducing mutual distrust and clarifying perceived humiliations, they preferred to wage war.

As in every war (and every citizen expropriation through financial fraud), it was foreseeable that only a few of the “decision-makers” would be among the 17 million dead (the destitute citizens) caused by this war.

When a few megalomaniacal potentates want to “play war”, every fart is a humiliation, and what was unacceptable about the “almost unacceptable ultimatum” were points 5 and 6 of the ultimatum, in which Austria-Hungary demanded the cooperation of its state organs in the investigations of the assassination.

Belgrade saw this as a “violation of the constitution and Serbian criminal law” (mostly taken for granted today, perhaps we have learned something after all) – the Serbian government nevertheless accepted all demands with one restriction.

But regardless, from July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary was at war with Serbia, and soon there was war throughout Europe. Serbia lost well over 90 percent of its soldiers, but as an ally of the Entente (UK + France + Russia, one of the warring parties against the Central Powers Austria-Hungary, German Empire, later also Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria), it was considered a victorious power in 1918.

The Serbian Prince Regent Alexander I Karađorđević founded the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which renamed itself Yugoslavia (= South Slavia) Alexander I soon fell victim to an assassination (along with the French Foreign Minister) by a newly strengthened national movement. Under the successors of the Karađorđević family, an “authoritarian royal dictatorship” largely based on the Serbian part of the population developed, until Peter II Karađorđević, the last king of Yugoslavia, was forced into exile after the German invasion of Yugoslavia (Balkan Campaign, April 1941).

Yugoslavia – which actually wanted to remain neutral – was completely occupied within a few days and divided up by the victors: Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Syrmia became Croatia, Banovina Zeta (almost equal to Montenegro and Kosovo) was occupied by Italian Nazis, Bačka fell to Hungary, Banat and “rump Serbia” were occupied by German Nazis, and southern and central Serbia were occupied by Bulgaria shortly afterwards.

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and King Peter II in exile organized the anti-fascist resistance, resulting in a popular uprising in Serbia (July 1941, later also in Montenegro, Bosnia and Croatia); in addition to resistance against the Wehrmacht, the Partisan movement controlled by the KPJ also began open combat against the Yugoslav monarchy.

In the autumn of 1941, the Serbian partisans were at least able to proclaim the liberated Republic of Užice (mountain region) and hold out against the Wehrmacht for 73 days, before being expelled and relocated. In Serbia, resistance against the fascist occupiers was maintained primarily by the Chetniks (popular, mostly anti-communist Serbian militias), with whom the communist Serbian partisans had various points of friction and who also worked against Tito's partisans in Bosnia and Croatia.

These Tito partisans were the nuclei of the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army , the People's Liberation Movement established in June 1941 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) under Tito's leadership, in which Abramović's parents were involved. This communist-dominated People's Liberation Army had declared a general uprising in July 1941. Tito had formed partisan units, and after Serbia was conquered by the occupying powers at the end of 1941, the partisans fled to eastern Bosnia under Tito's command.

There, the initially Serbian-Montenegrin-influenced uprising was transformed into a multinational people's liberation movement; 22,500 to 600 strong combat units were added by the end of the year, and in November 1942 the units were given the name "People's Liberation Army" .

This People's Liberation Army, under the leadership of Tito and in the shadow of the Allied air raids, fought for liberation from fascism and the restoration of Yugoslavia in the new form of a socialist federal state (Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia).

For the partisans, it was a murderous fight, initially with poor equipment and against barely identifiable opponents; this changed in the course of the fight through captured weapons, the gain of defectors, and finally through the support of the Allies, who dropped equipment and weapons from the air.

The partisans liberated Yugoslavia at great cost; German reprisals against the civilian population, the genocide perpetrated by the fascist Ustaša movement, and the remaining fighting resulted in at least 500,000 victims in total.

In 1944, a new Yugoslav government was formed under the mediation of Great Britain, in which the communists under Tito had the upper hand; the People's Liberation Army was absorbed into the Yugoslav People's Army.

The defining characteristic of an artist?

Marina Abramović's parents, guerrilla fighters against fascist murderers, had survived physically, but not necessarily psychologically, unscathed.

The partisans won, General Vojo Abramović was revered as a hero of the resistance, but both parents were deeply affected by the terrible suffering they had experienced during that time.

Abramović's mother, Danica Abramović, had studied medicine before the war but found it impossible to continue her studies after her horrific experiences. Instead, she chose the fine arts, studied art history, and in the 1960s became director of the Museum of Art and Revolution of Yugoslavia in Belgrade .

After the war, Vojo Abramović “joined the People’s Liberation Army to join the Yugoslav People’s Army” and worked for the Yugoslav Air Force.

When it comes to the artist Marina Abramović, the influence of her upbringing by her war-traumatized parents is rarely addressed in a way that isn't entirely negative; this is perhaps the reason for a somewhat different perspective:

Despite all the traumas: A strong family

When Marina Abramović's upbringing is a topic in the media (Marina Abramović's upbringing has been a topic in the media for many years and very frequently), usually many negative influences are mentioned that are said to have shaped Abramović and from which she suffered throughout her life.

What her parents allegedly did to her during her upbringing as part of their own trauma recovery fills volumes of media reports (and was the reason for the article “The artist as a public figure in the media: the example of Marina Abramović”).

However, no one ever asks about positive childhood memories, nor about the extent to which the artist has reconciled herself with some seemingly negative influences from her early development in the course of developing her “Abramović Method” (a holistic exercise program that challenges and unites body and mind, incorporating or anticipating many of the ideas of modern medicine that are currently opening up the tunnel vision of traditional medicine).

Instead of collecting and stringing together as many unpleasant details as possible, one can also approach the artist's childhood based on the facts that have been handed down and ask:

Is that really the case?

Was the upbringing of Marina and her younger brother Velimir solely defined by the “trauma of war,” devoid of love, support, and understanding? Even if one wishes to respectfully distance oneself from the inner workings of this family – the facts speak against it.

Of course, it is true that Marina Abramović's childhood and youth took place against a backdrop colored by the memories her parents had of the inhumanity of the war they had experienced ( “Abramović's upbringing played out against a backdrop that was coloured by the memories her parents had of the war's inhumanity” , from a publication by Mary Richards, available for download at Brunel University Research Archive ).

Of course, it is true that Marina Abramović suffered from the impressions her parents conveyed to her about the war – certainly conveyed very vividly, because they spoke from personal experience.

Naturally, Marina Abramović has incorporated and processed these impressions in her art, again and again, right up to the present day.

But isn't teaching children about the horrors of war an indispensable part of every child's upbringing in societies concerned with war prevention? Often this task falls solely to the schools, because there are too few committed parents to fulfill it?

And is it really necessary to mention any details of the parenting style practiced by Abramović's parents when discussing this topic?

These parents experienced terrible things and still had the courage to bring children into the world. After fighting to liberate his country, the father continued to work in a presumably well-paid profession to provide for his family.

The mother not only raised her children but also studied, consciously choosing art as a discipline that distracted her from her traumatic experiences. She even pursued a career in this field, becoming the director of a Belgrade museum.

Daughter Marina was evidently endowed through her upbringing with the foundation of knowledge and creativity that allowed her to conceive and produce art that is regarded as outstanding worldwide. She also possessed the self-confidence, education, and other skills necessary to succeed in the international art world – and thus in front of many very intelligent people.

Velimir Abramović, born in 1952, also received the foundation for an equally successful and unusual career through his upbringing.

In 1985, Velimir Abramović received his doctorate; his dissertation dealt with the problem of continuity in the natural philosophy of Leibniz and Boscovich. In 1989, Dr. Abramović became Professor of Film Theory at the University of Arts in Belgrade, in 1990 Professor of Concepts of Time, Space, and Matter in the Natural Sciences at the University of Belgrade, and from 2004 to 2007 Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Belgrade Academy of Arts.

However, the philosopher Abramović not only works in academic science, but has also long been known as a Tesla expert .

The physicist and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) , also of Serbian descent, was a brilliant inventor. Among his 700 patents were so many crucial innovations in the field of electrical engineering (especially electrical power engineering, e.g., our alternating current) that the Balkans are known the “cradle of modernity” kritisches-netzwerk.de ).

Furthermore, Tesla was one of the most fascinating scientific figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a biography unparalleled in its dramatic developments. Anyone who has only briefly studied his life will forever wonder why Hollywood is only now realizing the “unbelievable number of Tesla films to be made” .

At least it's starting now, with four films in 2014, two in 2015, and in 2016 comes “Tesla”, theatrical release planned for July 2016 and under the “grateful acknowledgment” of Velimir Abramović ( IMDB – Tesla ; under IMDB – Velimir Abramovic you can find the films on which the professor actively collaborated).

founded and published “Tesliana scientific magazine” in 1993 wrote “The Light That Never Goes Out” launched “Tesla Cosmological Studies”

Furthermore, in 2001 he founded, for example, the private philosophical school “Institute for the Science of Time” in Barajevo, Serbia, where he works on formulating the foundations of the science of time. You can read more about this exciting topic and about Professor Dr. Velimir Abramović's other activities on his website constantpresenttime.com .

Abramović is not only interested in film in the field of art; in 1967 he published a collection of poems called “Smeop” (Simply Made Electronically Operated Poems?), and in 2015 he gave an educational talk to an audience about Nikola Tesla at a theater festival in Dubrovnik ( lepetitfestival.com ).

The keyword "art" serves as a reminder that this article is actually about the artist Marina Abramović. This digression may have clarified that, despite her parents' horrific experiences, she grew up in an exceptionally strong and successful family that undoubtedly instilled in her much more than a profound aversion to armed conflict.

War again!

Marina Abramović's approach to the theme of "humanity and war" not only shaped by her parents' experiences, as peace did not last very long in her homeland:

Serbia and the other Yugoslav republics developed their own unique form of semi-industrialized society in the new Socialist Yugoslavia between 1945 and the collapse of communism in 1990, a society in which it was quite possible to live.

The universally revered partisan leader and head of state Tito succeeded in glorifying communism as a “people’s religion” and himself as a myth; he was thus able to hold the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, which united different nationalities, together for a long time with relatively little conflict.

Not without an authoritarian style of government and the violent elimination of political opponents, but quite independent from Russia and with its own independent foreign policy relations with the West. After Tito was elected president in 1953, he advocated for equality among states in peaceful coexistence and for developing countries.

Tito, together with Egyptian President Nasser, Indian Prime Minister Nehru and Indonesian President Sukarno, campaigned for political non-alignment; on their initiative, the international movement (organization) of non-aligned states founded in 1961.

States that did not belong to either of the two military blocs of the Cold War and wanted to remain neutral, the then 25 members (Yugoslavia was one of the most respected) advocated for peaceful coexistence and disarmament.

With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s, the organization lost its founding purpose; however, what remained was an alliance that aimed for equality between states and positive economic development of the member states.

With now at least 120 members, the states of the Non-Aligned Movement represent around 55 percent of the world's population and hold almost two-thirds of the seats in the UN General Assembly.

Domestically, Tito pursued an authoritarian style of government, immediately nationalizing agricultural land and, in 1948, also the trades; this was followed by rapid industrialization and urbanization of agrarian societies at the expense of traditional village communities. Heavy industry, steelworks, motor vehicle production, gigantic lead-zinc and copper mines, and the electrical industry sprang up in the interior of the country.

By the end of the Five-Year Plan in 1965, Serbia possessed a vehicle and engine industry, a machinery industry, and a petrochemical industry; significant infrastructure projects such as the nearly 1200 km long transit highway, the Danube-Tisza-Danube Canal, the Derdap hydroelectric power plant, and the railway network were initiated and completed. When the planned economy system was abolished in 1965, Yugoslav society had undergone a significant civilizational transformation.

Tito's government remained authoritarian even after that, but following the dismissal of Aleksandar Ranković, the security chief who persecuted regime opponents and was ultimately accused of abuse of power, Yugoslav society underwent a significant liberalization in 1966, with relatively free opportunities for the development of art and culture, for example. This was not good for the federal state, however, as the cultural authorities pursued nationalistic agendas, and with the separation of languages, culture became a focal point for national ambitions after the first amendment to the constitution in 1963.

Simultaneously, the first disagreements between the nationalities emerged in other areas as well. The federal fund for financing infrastructure projects had to be discontinued in 1970 due to disputes between Slovenia and Croatia, and Serbia and Montenegro. In 1971, nationalist aspirations manifested themselves in the "Croatian Spring ," which Tito suppressed by invoking "Bratstvo i Jedinstvo" ("Brotherhood and Unity," the "core of Yugoslav socialism"), albeit violently and with mass arrests.

The new constitution initiated by Tito in 1974 strengthened his position as president, but also emphasized federalism more strongly, a further step towards the dissolution of the federation of Yugoslavia into separate states. This weakened the federation internally, a process that the aging and ailing Tito could no longer reverse, not even through his 1978 attempt to preserve Yugoslav unity by symbolically electing himself president for life.

After Tito's death in 1980, the unified Yugoslav state dissolved at an accelerating pace. The economic crisis of the 1980s fueled nationalist movements and programs to the same extent as the current "refugee crisis" does. In Yugoslavia, too, the crisis quickly brought dangerously powerful "strongmen/movements" to the forefront, who sought to seize power by feigning simple solutions, but upon closer inspection, offered not the slightest viable proposal for resolving a complex conflict situation.

In Yugoslavia, what all European states will hopefully be spared in the course of dealing with the current migration movement happened, with terrible consequences for all nationalities in the federal state:

Serbia was "reborn" around and with its new "strongman" Slobodan Milošević ; Kosovo's autonomy was curtailed from 1987 and revoked in 1989. In 1990, the conflict intensified with Slovenia's withdrawal from the League of Communists. Simultaneously, the Krajina Serbs, in opposition to the Croatian independence movement, planned a military secession of Krajina from Croatia. With the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in early summer 1991, Yugoslavia was at war .

The Yugoslav Wars lasted until 1995, with ethnic cleansing, massacres, genocide, countless war deaths, occupations and expulsions, hardship due to the UN trade embargo halting the supply of vital goods, and a Serbia “by a precariat of criminals and thugs” ( de.wikipedia.org ) from the Miloševic milieu.

The predominantly Albanian-populated province of Kosovo remained a hotbed of unrest, which the Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milošević unsuccessfully attempted to quell with restrictive police and ultimately military interventions. This was followed by the Kosovo War from 1998 to 1999: a conflict waged by the Serbian leadership against the KLA (“Kosovo Liberation Army”) characterized by serious human rights violations, including against civilians, and brought to an end by the (in some details controversial) intervention of Western states, led by the USA, through military pressure from NATO.

Since the end of the Yugoslav-Kosovo wars, Serbia (and Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro) has been moving towards membership in the European Union. Alongside Turkey, the Balkan states of Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are the last states on the European continent that are not yet permanently anchored in a democratic community of states as EU candidate countries.

How sad that almost the entire EU is currently behaving as if it wants to mock the necessity of a common union for conflict prevention, among other things. It is urgently hoped that this civilizational regression to a bygone era of petty national squabbles is merely due to a temporary state of being overwhelmed.

However, level-headed politicians, who simply do their (European negotiating) work regardless of the alarming “news” reports inherent in media coverage, express themselves almost universally with confidence.

Art in its noblest function: as a memorial against war

Marina Abramović certainly had more than just her parents' accounts of war to process when she made her most famous statement against war “Balkan Baroque” in 1997 (performed at the 47th Venice Biennale, awarded the Golden Lion)

“Balkan Baroque” ran for four days, four hellish days, during which the artist sat for six hours each day on a mountain piled high with 1,500 fresh and still bloody cattle bones. Abramović cleaned the bloody bones, washing away blood and meat residue with a metal brush and water (from a copper bucket or tub), while singing funeral songs (continuously, for six hours), a different folk song each day from one of the former Yugoslav republics.

In the background, a video installation played, showing Marina Abramović's parents with sometimes disturbing gestures, and a video recorded by the artist herself, which was played on a loop. Marina Abramović is seen in a white lab coat; she explains how, in the Balkans, cannibalistic "wolf rats" are bred for rat extermination: if you lock up peaceful rats long enough and starve them, they become cannibals.

Yuck? What terrible animals! Humans are supposedly capable of similar things, and humans are the only animals in the entire world that drive individuals of their own or other species to such extreme distress that they behave cruelly. Yet humans do this often and willingly – according to Abramović, the performance is called “Balkan Baroque” because the people of the Balkans have a mentality full of contradictions that hardly anyone from the outside understands: hatred and love, tenderness and cruelty, the veneration of heroes and the creation of heroic legends, a penchant for cheap, almost pornographic entertainment…

The average empathetic European would certainly not limit these traits to the Balkans almost two decades later; he sees hatred from a so-called Islamic State towards anyone who thinks differently, cruelties towards refugees throughout Europe, hero worship for the leaders of right-wing populist parties, a tendency towards cheap, almost pornographic entertainment in the nightly television program, and hopefully still a little love and tenderness in his private environment.

The “universal validity of the message” , which was so important to Abramović at the time, is proving itself to be horribly true; just as Abramović’s second role in the video, a dancing beauty with a blood-red cloth, was perceived by more sensitive people, the everyday popular amusements of our time are now seen only as a parable of a world full of absurdity and as a tragedy.

Much interpretive literature has been written about “Balkan Baroque” , in which all aspects of the performance are analyzed and emphasized.

Before you delve into articles about “Balkan Baroque”, you should definitely watch the work itself. In the video above, you will find a roughly ten-minute excerpt with footage of the preparation and follow-up. The following video, “Балканское барокко | Balkan Baroque”, is a slightly longer film about a remake, shown in 2009 at the Solyanka Club in Moscow. Finally, there is the documentary “Balkan Baroque” , which film director Pierre Coulibeuf released in 1999 about Marina Abramović, with her as co-writer and performer.

“Balkan Baroque” has an immediate impact; the performance needs no interpretation. It's not difficult to discern that the killer rats and bone-cleaning allude to the “ethnic cleansing” of the Yugoslav Wars.

That the entire performance “Balkan Baroque” is an attempt by the artist to process the disintegration of her homeland caused by a horrific succession of armed conflicts and the associated atrocities is understood by anyone who is informed about recent events and knows the basic outlines of the artist's biography as a native Yugoslavian and child of war-traumatized parents.

The video introduces viewers of subsequent generations, who are not familiar with the recent history of the nearby Balkan states: “Balkan Baroque” was difficult to realize because neither official organizations nor people with political influence were willing to support Abramović’s artistic and political statement on the Yugoslav Wars.

Abramović was supposed to represent first Serbia and then Montenegro in the Yugoslavian National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Serbia withdrew after the artist presented her design, while Montenegro remained undecided for a long time. After months of no response to the submitted design for the art project, newspapers reported on the statement by the Montenegrin Minister of Culture: it was all a misunderstanding, Abramović had never been invited.

The artwork would cost so much that poor pensioners in Montenegro would have nothing left to eat if the state supported the project; there are more important artists in Montenegro, and their work smells bad…

Following the invitation, attacks were launched against the artist, simultaneously pitting different groups within society against each other – a remarkably embarrassing political action. Abramović ultimately performed the piece “in exile,” which was granted to her in the Italian Pavilion.

The video introduction goes on to say: “Balkan Baroque” is a contribution to the purification of conscience , because the path to the future is only open to those who do not shy away from seeing the horrors of the past and present…

When Marina Abramović staged “Balkan Baroque”, she was already a recognized and famous artist; an overview of the development of her artistic work is given in the article “Marina Abramović: Art for Destructive Societies” .