This January saw a staging of Marina Abramović’s seminal performance Balkan Erotic Epic at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona—a reminder of the enduring power of performance and action art to test the limits of the human body, belief, and endurance. It may be art which cannot be collected, however there are other ways that collectors can celebrate and remember the most powerful performances and actions by some of our greatest and bravest artists of today, through photographs, documents and videos.
Text by Angie Afifi
We often discuss the art market, its trends, prices, and major players. At its core, it is driven by the logic of possession. Usually, when we talk about the art market, the focus is on traditional forms such as painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography. Over time, new manifestations have joined them, including installations, digital art, and video art, forms that expand our habitual understanding of the art object. But what happens when art cannot be acquired or collected? When it is ephemeral, disappearing through time and space, and cannot be transferred onto a physical medium? Theatre, dance, and music, as long as they are not digitized or fixed in some way, remain outside the framework of the traditional art market. Performance art belongs precisely to this category.
If in art forms that presuppose the creation of a final object, its preservation, and its display, artists work with a variety of materials, then in ephemeral forms of art the human body itself becomes both the instrument and the artwork. Here the individual gives themselves entirely to the process, turning into living artistic material. Movement, breath, voice, presence all of this constitutes the final object, one that cannot be repeated or purchased.
In this sense, performance opens up a particular perspective. Art becomes not so much an object as an experience, an encounter, a moment that exists only here and now. It is precisely this ephemerality that makes it unique. But what if
It is no secret that art emerged together with humanity. Throughout history, artists have consistently turned toward the past, to its forms, symbols, and traditions. But what if one were to turn not only to the art of the past, but also to the very way of seeing and experiencing life, to rituals, to collective memory, to what lies hidden deep within us, in our bodies, our genes, the spiritual experience of our ancestors? Is such a contact with the inner history of the human being even possible?
It turns out that it is. Forms of art such as performance open hidden portals and propose new ways of perception and immersion. A central example here is the work of Marina Abramovic. Throughout her career, she has explored the boundaries of the physical and the spiritual, digging deeper than seems possible, moving toward the very beginning, toward origin and birth. Her Balkan Erotic Epic was first presented in England in 2025, and more recently, in January 2026, the work reached Spain, Barcelona.
According to the artist herself, this is her most ambitious project. The largest, you might think? Rather, the most vulnerable. Here the artist touches the most unprotected zone, the place where culture has not yet learned to pretend. And that is precisely why this project cannot be repeated. It is deeply connected to the artist’s own body, to her origins, to something that cannot be translated into a universal language.
In this work, Abramovic constructs a space in which archaic rituals, eroticism, and Balkan memory manifest through the body as a living archive. Memory exists here not so much in narrative as in gestures, breath, the reactions of the skin, in the way the body responds to fear, shame, and desire. Perhaps it is fear, shame, and desire that become the main driving forces of this life revealed in a work where pain and love coexist simultaneously.
What is also striking is that the performance process does not simply reproduce the past. It seems to awaken what is forbidden and repressed, yet painfully familiar. There is a sense that the body suddenly remembers what the mind has long tried to forget.
One could say that the main aim of this project is activation. An activation of a return to inner memory, to zones of culture that were never fully legitimized by religion, politics, or morality. This is what makes the work deeply personal and at the same time universal. The Balkans in this performance are not a geography, but a state in which pagan, Christian, bodily, and traumatic elements coexist without destroying one another.
Eroticism here does not seek to be attractive. It is rough, ritualistic, at times almost aggressive, and for that very reason it is devoid of vulgarity. Vulgarity arises where the body is separated from meaning. Here, the body itself is meaning.
It is worth noting that for the contemporary viewer, such scenes may appear excessive or even indecent. But perhaps it is not the scenes that are excessive, but we who have become impoverished. Our culture has learned to fear its own body and labels as obscene everything that exceeds permitted boundaries. In any case, one thing is clear. Abramovic is not trying to shock. She refuses to filter. And in this refusal lies radical honesty and freedom.
Not only in this project, but throughout her entire career, Abramovic presents a body that ceases to be individual. It belongs not to a person, but to a community, to the land, to a cycle. It does not tell the story of a personality. It serves, connects, becomes an instrument of relation. And this is precisely what may be frightening today. The illusion of autonomy disappears, the body ceases to be the property of the I.
In a broader context of performance art, such a dissolution of the individual self into experience is not an exception, but one of its fundamental strategies. The artist’s body ceases to be a carrier of authorial style and becomes a conduit, a channel through which collective fears, traumas, desires, and historical tensions pass. Performance always operates on the edge of loss of control. The artist initiates the process, but does not fully possess it. In this sense, it is closer to ritual than to a work of art in the conventional understanding.
It is no coincidence that other key figures of performance art, such as Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) and Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), among others, also turned to the body as a site of memory and transformation. In Beuys, it was a body wounded by history and myth. In Mendieta, a body merging with the landscape, disappearing into earth, grass, blood. In all these cases, the focus was not on self expression, but on an attempt to restore lost connections between human beings and nature, between the present and a repressed past, between individual experience and the collective unconscious.
A similar turn toward embodied memory and vernacular knowledge can be found in the work of contemporary artists from Russia. For many of them, performance becomes a way to work through questions of identity, forgotten histories, and inherited traditions. The performances of Alice Hualice, for example, draw on folk practices, repeated bodily actions, and personal myths to explore identity as something lived, fragile, and constantly changing. Her work unfolds at the meeting point of the personal and the ancestral, where traditional gestures are brought back to life through the contemporary body, but not as folklore to be preserved. It is rather about lived actions that help the artist explore who she is and where she comes from. In this way, folk culture is treated as a tool rather than a set of symbols, a way for the body to remember and to think.
This approach resonates with a broader lineage of Russian performance art, from the radical investigations of instinct and dehumanization of Oleg Kulik (b.1961), to the endurance-based works exploring vulnerability and collective pressure of Olga Kroytor (b.1986) and Taus Makhacheva’s (b.1983) performative engagement with Dagestani traditions, gravity, and transmission. In each case, the body functions as a site where cultural memory is neither preserved nor represented, but temporarily activated, only to remind us of itself and to be reinterpreted before disappearing again.
Unlike traditional art forms, performance leaves no stable object behind that can be fixed, possessed, or fully contained. Its primary value resides in the immediacy of the encounter: the charged space between the artist’s presence and that of the viewer, experienced in real time and irreducible to repetition. To witness a performance is therefore to accept its urgency — the knowledge that it unfolds only once, and that to be present is essential.
And yet, while the performance itself vanishes, what endures are its residues. Photographs, videos, sketches, and other forms of documentation become the lasting witnesses to an event that can no longer be revisited. These materials do not replace the live act, nor do they claim to stabilize it; rather, they operate as fragments, partial records that attest to something that has already slipped into the past. It is through these documents that performance enters history, not as a fixed object, but as a constellation of traces.
This tension — between the unrepeatable nature of the live act and the persistence of its documentation — is precisely what allows performance to resist full institutionalization and commodification. It does not aspire to wholeness or closure, nor can it be entirely archived or controlled. Like lived experience or bodily memory, it remains incomplete, unstable, and ultimately elusive.
Perhaps this is performance’s greatest strength. In a culture driven by preservation, accumulation, and permanence, performance asserts the value of vulnerability, loss, and temporality. It reminds us that meaning does not always reside in what can be preserved. Some forms of knowledge are transmitted only through presence — through risk, exposure, and the physical encounter itself — even as their traces continue to speak long after the moment has passed.
