Balkan Baroque

Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

Performance and the radical body

Medium

Venice Biennale, Venice

The work matters because it joins political testimony and physical presence in an almost unendurable form of memory.

Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque — Balkan Baroque · Venice Biennale, Venice

Highlights

Surprising facts & legends

Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.

Interesting facts

The story around the work

Interesting facts & legends

Abramović sat on a mound of roughly 1,500 freshly slaughtered, still-bloody cow bones for six hours a day over four consecutive days — the smell in the basement pavilion was reportedly overwhelming enough to make visitors leave within minutes.
She won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale, making her the first performance artist — and one of very few women — to receive that award in the exhibition's century-long history.
The performance had a third component most people never see in documentation: two large video projections showing her parents and herself dressed in Serbian folk costumes, speaking about a folk tale in which a wolf-child is created when its mother washes it in blood — a direct metaphor for how nationalist mythology breeds violence.
Abramović wore a white lab coat throughout, an outfit she deliberately chose to evoke both a scientist and a surgeon — someone trying to perform a clinical procedure on something that cannot be made clean.
The bones she used were real slaughterhouse waste purchased in Venice; after the performance ended, the entire installation — bones, blood, and all — had to be disposed of as biological hazard material.
When the performance began on June 15, 1997, the Dayton Agreement had been signed only eighteen months earlier, meaning the war in Bosnia had technically just ended — most of the audience had been reading about mass graves in newspapers just the year before.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

More details Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work

Historical context

Balkan Baroque inside its era

The project was shown at the Venice Biennale, where it received the Golden Lion.

Balkan Baroque is Marina Abramović's 1997 performance about the victims of the wars in former Yugoslavia. For four days she sat for hours on a heap of bloodied cow bones, scrubbing them while singing and speaking, turning the impossibility of cleansing into an image of collective grief and memory. The location in Venice Biennale, Venice matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.

Path to recognition

How the work became widely known

It is remembered as one of the strongest anti-war statements in late twentieth-century performance art.

Value

Why the work matters now

The work matters because it joins political testimony and physical presence in an almost unendurable form of memory.

Connections and legacy

How to read the work more broadly

Marina Abramovic became one of the central figures of performance art, where meaning is generated through action, the body, endurance, and direct contact with the viewer.

Official sources

Where to verify the institutional context

There is no institution link in the registry for this work yet, but the long-form reading below is already composed from the artwork’s history, value, and museum context.

Visual context