Balkan Elegy: Analysis of the Performance Artist Marina Abramovic

My research project revolves around performance artist Marina Abramović and works she has created in the last two decades, with a particular focus placed upon the autobiographical video and performance works produced between 1997 and 2005. These works form a period of the nostalgic evocation of her native country (Serbia) or region (the Balkans), and simultaneously delve into her family\\\\u27s background, Abramović, a child of Yugoslav military officials, chooses the moment after the culmination of the Yugoslav wars to commence these works, at the time when she herself was distanced from the war-riven region: a wanderer equipped with rationale eager to balance fact and fiction, memento mori and humor, death and life. The period of her art production I will be analyzing, rich with ritual imagery, is framed with its beginning - the major work performed at the XLVII Venice Biennale in 1997, Balkan Baroque, and its ending - Balkan Erotic Epic, video, Belgrade, 2005. These works are conceived as thesis and antithesis: tragedy and satire. My primary area of interest in this research paper is the formulation of these antipodes within a synthesis which could be named \\\ Balkan elegy\\\ , through Abramović\\\\u27s usage of Balkans\\\\u27 history, modern Serbian history stained with bloodshed and genocide, political and social evolution, and, most importantly, tradition or Serbian folklore, imagined as primitive and pagan, and ambiguously represented as innocent and scandalous, and even pornographically offensive