Balkan Erotic Epic Installation

Balkan Erotic Epic: The Installation is a daytime art installation at Park Avenue Armory, presented as a companion to the Armory's run of the live performance Balkan Erotic Epic. Both are the work of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović. The installation has no actors and no plot. You walk through the set on your own schedule and look at sculptures, films and animation taken from the performance.

Abramović was born in Belgrade in 1946. She has described the full project as the biggest undertaking of her career and a way back to her Slavic roots. The material comes from Balkan folklore, myths, rites and rituals, and it keeps returning to desire, spirituality, tradition and our bond with nature. It also touches on shame, female energy, the communist past of the Balkans and the artist's own family.

Factory International in Manchester produced the work, and the Armory is one of eight co-commissioners. The Armory bills the New York presentation as a North American premiere. It is set to open in December 2026.

There is no story to follow, in the installation or in the performance it grows from. The live version is a sequence of 13 ritual scenes drawn from Balkan folklore, with a narrator who guides the audience through the mythology. The installation lets you meet the same world without the live action.

Scenes include Scaring the Gods, Tito's Funeral, Fertility Rite and Massaging the Breast. Tito's Funeral is built around the funeral of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, and his widow Jovanka Broz and the artist's mother Danica Abramović appear in it. Elsewhere the performance draws on wedding-preparation rites, mourning rites, and folk recipes and potions for love, war and fertile crops.

The installation gathers film, sculpture, animation, set design and costume from the performance and lays them out as a space to explore. When it was first shown in Manchester, the set included woodland, Balkan-style bathtubs and a café built at life size. The performance's set is organized around The Kafana Complex, a Balkan-style café-bar used for performances, mourning rituals and celebrations. Which pieces will travel to New York is a question for the Armory's website.

Balkan Erotic Epic began in 2005 as a video work, and the 2005 series also includes photographs. In 2006 Abramović made a roughly 14-minute short on the same theme for the anthology film Destricted.

The durational performance had its world premiere at Aviva Studios in Manchester in October 2025, and the installation version was first shown there during the same run. A separate stage version opened at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in January 2026 and later played Berlin. A related exhibition, Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. The Exhibition, was held at the Gropius Bau in Berlin earlier in 2026. The Armory has also scheduled an artist talk with Abramović in its Veterans Room, part of its Making Space at the Armory series.