Balkan Baroque（1997），Performance photograph，124.5 × 216 cm，Courtesy of Collezione La Gaia, Busca-Italy

Balkan Baroque was first performed in the summer of 1997’s Venice Biennale, where Marina Abramović responded to the innumerable deaths that took place during the ethnically-driven Yugoslav Wars. The work was personally significant to her as she was born in Belgrade, the former Yugoslavia.

Spanning four days and surrounded by image projections of her parents and herself, Abramović sat amidst 1,500 cow bones in a white dress while washing the bloody bones. As she wept and sung native folk songs, a recorded description of methods used in the Balkans for killing rats played in the background. 

“You can’t wash the blood from your hands as you can’t wash away the shame from the war,” said Abramovic. Here, the inability to scrub away blood was compared to the inability to erase the shame of war. For Abramović, recounting the number of people lost in modern-day war was insufficient. Instead, she chose to remember the lives killed by war by carefully touching and cleaning ‘their’ physical bones and blood. 

Pieta（2002），Photograph，180 × 180 cm，Courtesy of Collezione La Gaia, Busca-Italy

Marina Abramović is known for her vanguard performances that often utilise her body as both subject matter and vehicle. In the artist’s words, “The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.” 

The artwork, Pieta, is part of the Anima Mundi (Soul of the world) performance work, where Anima Mundi sought to symbolise relations between man and woman. This work was created as a post-performance documentation by Abramović in Bangkok in 1983. Informed by important iconography in Christian art, Abramović replays the old representation of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ across her lap. Akin to Michelangelo’s Pieta, Abramović is dressed in a red gown and tenderly takes in her arms the abandoned body of her former lover, German performance artist, Ulay.

Here, universal concepts of existence such as life and death, mother and child are further dramatised by the artist’s choice of rich contrasting colours of red and white.