Marina Abromavić, Balkan Baroque, 1997, Projections, cow bones, copper sinks and tub filled with black water, bucket, soap, metal brush, white dress

Reminiscent of Cleaning the Mirror #1 (1995), in which she sat on a stool for three hours washing a skeleton, Abramovic created Balkan Baroque in response to the innumerable deaths that had taken place in the former Yugoslavia. Sitting on top of 1,500 cow bones in a white dress, she spent four days, six hours a day, washing each of these bloody bones, surrounded by projected images of her parents and herself. The accompanying sound included her recorded description of methods used in the Balkans for killing rats and her singing of her native folksongs. The performance progression was made visceral due to the unbearable heat of the basement room and fetid smell. For Abramovic, it was not enough to simply recount the number of people lost in modern-day war. Instead, she aimed to remember the lives, efforts and hopes of individuals killed by carefully touching and cleaning “their” physical bones and blood. Transforming her individual performative experiences into universal ideas was also an important concept for Abramovic throughout all her work. The comparison between the inability to scrub away all the blood and the inability to erase the shame of war is a concept she viewed as having universal reach.