Balkan Baroque
Balkan Baroque
Marina Abramović , 1997
solo performance at the Venice Biennale, 4 days and 6 hours; 3-channel video, bones, copper bucket, copper tub, water
Balkan Baroque was a performance by the artist Marina Abramović , who was born in Belgrade, formerly Yugoslavia , and was performed at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 . The artist sat with a copper tub and bucket on a large mountain of cattle bones and cleaned them, singing Yugoslav songs for the dead and video recordings being shown in the background. The performance was awarded the Golden Lion of the Biennale. With this work, the artist wanted to express the sadness about the collapse of her homeland and the many deaths of the Yugoslav wars.
description
The performance Balkan Baroque ran over a period of four days, during which the artist sat for six hours on a mountain of 1,500 fresh, partly still bloody cattle bones and cleaned them of the remaining meat with a brush and water from a copper bucket and a copper tub . She sang Yugoslav folk songs throughout , choosing a song of the dead from the different republics every day.
In the background, breast videos of her parents were shown via a 3-channel video system, flanking a self-recording by the artist. The film with her showed her in a video loop, in which she alternately in a white, scientific-looking lab coat explains how to raise the so-called "wolf rats" in the Balkans and thus confront rat plagues, and dance in a black dress to Yugoslav folk music.
Background and interpretation
The performance was created against the background of the Yugoslav wars between the different republics of the country, which escalated from 1991 and finally led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia into a number of successor states in 2003. Especially the heavy military conflicts in Croatia war between Croatian and Serbian armies and the war in Bosnia in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina (both 1991-1995) led to massive upheavals in the region and cost a total of about 300,000 lives.
Marina Abramović was born in Yugoslavia and tried to come to terms with the disintegration of her home country and the associated atrocities in the performance. In doing so, she ties in with her theater performance Delusional from 1994, in which she primarily depicts helplessness and anger over what has happened. In Balkan Baroque, on the other hand, the sadness about the irreversible state of decay after the wars came to the fore. The processing of the loss and the many sacrifices, which were symbolized by the fresh and still bloody bones, should become the center of the work of art through the washing of the individual bones. This relationship was reinforced by the choice of the songs she sang at the ablution; they were all songs of the dead, which are traditionally sung by mourners at funerals.
The performance got a personal connection through the video installation that Abramović showed between her parents. Both parents were politically active, her father Vojo Abramović was a commander and became a folk hero, her mother was a major in the army and later director of the Museum of Revolution and Art in Belgrade .
Aftermath
Balkan Baroque is one of Marina Abramović's most famous works today. The director Pierre Coulibeuf took on the title Balkan Baroque for his 1999 film about the artist. The script for the film was developed together with Marina Abramović and she portrayed herself in the film.
supporting documents
- ^ Balkan Baroque , 1999: Film, statement and portrait by Pierre Coulibeuf.
- ↑ Portrait of the artist at culturebase.net ( Memento of the original from August 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ^ Entry in the Internet Movie Database for Marina Abramović.
literature
- Balkan Baroque. In: Sylvia Martin, Uta Grosenick: Video Art. Taschen GmbH, Cologne 2006; Pp. 26-27, ISBN 978-3-8228-2947-9 .
- Art Forum International . Volume 138, September - November 1997; P. 378f.