Serbian artist Abramović: Nobody can wash the blood from their hands

BELGRADE, (Patria) - She cleaned bloody cow bones reacting to the horrors of the war in the Balkans, allowed the audience to kiss her, but also to whip her and cut her body, she jumped into a burning partisan star and sat for three months non-stop looking into the eyes of 1,500 people.

Marina Abramović performed most of these performances – outside of Belgrade.

“Nobody invited me to come before. This absence was not intentional on my part. The reason for such a long absence is very simple, plus the Museum of Contemporary Art was closed for renovation for a whole decade,” Abramović explains to the BBC in Serbian why she took such a long break from Belgrade.

After almost half a century, Marina Abramović arrives with “The Cleaner” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade on September 21.

For BBC in Serbian , she spoke about life in the Balkans, this region in her works, but also about why pain is important in her performances and how she views politics in Serbia.

When Marina appeared at the Venice Biennale in 1997 with bloody cow bones, symbols of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the public in Serbia was shocked. While she was removing remnants of blood and flesh from the bones with a steel brush, videos of her parents and her dancing to Balkan folk music were shown in the background. Bowls of water were placed around the room, inviting symbolic spiritual purification, like large chalices at the entrance to churches. Marina spent six hours for four days – the duration of the performance – cleaning the bones, of which there were more than a hundred.

“Balkan Baroque, on the one hand, represents a response to the horrors of the war in the Balkans, and on the other hand, it is a metaphor for any war at any time and place.”

“I still believe that nobody can wash the blood from their hands. What is done – is done.”

“At the same time, I believe that the only way not to be trapped by guilt and regret and not to repeat the past is to look forward,” says Marina Abramović.

This, she says, “does not refer to the way a country should be led, but to how each of us looks at life.”

Abramović was born in 1946 into a partisan family in Belgrade. Her parents were active participants in the National Liberation War. She studied in the sixties at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and Zagreb. She has worked with pain from the beginning. One of her first performances was jumping into a burning (partisan) star. For years, she lectured at universities in Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg. She became part of the global mainstream. Lady Gaga stated that the artist is her “role model.”