Agnes Gryczkowska Discusses Curating Marina Abramović's Berlin Mega Show

Marina Abramović (b. 1946) has returned to Berlin with a solo exhibition that reaches back across decades of performance history while looking squarely at the present. At Gropius Bau,“Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition” runs through August 23 and marks her first solo presentation in the city since the 1990s.

The exhibition gathers historical and recent works in film, installation, sculpture, and live action, building an environment shaped by ritual, eroticism, death, and transformation. Rather than treating those themes as separate strands, the show links them through Balkan folklore, Abramović's own biography, and a sustained interest in the body as a site of political and spiritual intensity.

At the opening, a large screen showed“Tito's Funeral” (2025), in which women beat their chests in a trance-like gesture drawn from communal mourning rituals. In front of the projection, Svetlana Spajić performed live as a brass band procession moved through the space, giving the exhibition a charged, almost ceremonial atmosphere.

The show is co-curated by Agnes Gryczkowska and Jenny Schlenzka, director of the museum. Gryczkowska, a London-based art historian and writer, has built a reputation for exhibitions that bring contemporary and historical material into uneasy, theatrical conversation. Her recent projects include“Au-delà” at Lafayette Anticipation in Paris and“Theatre of Cruelty” at Casino Luxembourg.

According to Gryczkowska, the exhibition expands ideas that have been present in Abramović's work from the beginning. In early pieces such as“Rhythm 5” (1974) and“Lips of Thomas” (1975/2005), the body is solitary and pushed toward endurance. Here, that logic shifts outward. The body becomes collective, embedded in land, myth, and ancestry rather than isolated ordeal.

That shift is central to the exhibition's structure, which is organized into three chapters: The Political Body, Eroticism of the Earth, and Eroticism and Death. The framework places Yugoslavia, Tito, and the Balkans alongside Abramović's own artistic legacy, while also drawing on Georges Bataille's thinking about eroticism, loss of control, and mortality.

One of the exhibition's quieter but telling details is the inclusion of a late Neolithic female figurine fragment from North Macedonia, which extends the show's timeline far beyond the contemporary moment. The result is less a retrospective than a dense, layered argument about how ritual survives, mutates, and returns through art.

In Berlin, Abramović is not simply revisiting familiar themes. She is enlarging them, asking what happens when private extremity becomes shared ceremony, and when the erotic is understood not as spectacle but as a force tied to fertility, grief, and change.

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