• Marina Abramovic
• Balkan Erotic Epic: Banging the Skull, 2005
• Framed chromogenic print
• 104x104 cm
• Edition 2 of 7

The conflict in the Balkans during the second half of the 1990s touched Marina Abramovic deeply, bringing her back to her Serbian and Montenegrin origins, inspiring her art to become more evocative and symbolic.

The theme of energy is a primary focus in her work. This work is still different in respect to her previous works. The fertility rites of the Serbian peasants offer themselves to the falling rain. Since ancient times, the Balkan culture used the female and male sexual organs as tools against illnesses and the evil forces of nature. The purpose of these ceremonies was to remove the threat of destruction that a bad storm would have on crops. Through acts, Marina Abramovic’s concerns the sacred and mystic. It gives eroticism a role in the harmonious composition of the cosmos, because the body becomes the means by which rain becomes fertile and acquires meaning upon contact with the earth.

Through an act of imitating magic, it tries to drive away the threat, making its body in consonance with the primordial and erotic force that holds the universe. The images of this work can seem, for the nudity exists, intollerable to our modern and western sensibilities, but they are widely redeemed for the innocence and spontaneity that comes to them from a lost, primitive and pagan world. They reveal the primodial and archiac aspects that are buried deep within our conscience. Her work discovers the mistical quality of the body in its nudity, throwing a light on all her previous works.