A drop of blood
Michael Hübl
The knife to the carotid artery was familiar to her: anyone who grows up under conditions that Gabriela Oberkofler experienced as normal in her childhood and youth must develop a dialectical relationship with blood. Normal here means: in accordance with common practice, following generally accepted social norms. In the rural areas of South Tyrol, at least during the 1980s and 1990s, this normality still included slaughtering. The butcher starts, stabs, the blood pulses out in a powerful stream. Someone is already waiting to catch it in a bowl, because it is precious. Life becomes food. The heat dissipates, the animal is dismembered. What remains is meat.
A second encounter with blood is also part of young Gabriela Oberkofler’s experience. During the obligatory visits to church services in the village community, she is also confronted with the moment of fundamental change—the change from life to death, death to life. According to the Roman Catholic view, a transubstantiation takes place in the Eucharist: the bread of the host becomes the body of Christ, the wine becomes his blood. A completed historical event (Jesus’ death on the cross) is actualized through the liturgical event at the altar and is intended to become an acute reality of life. The action is realized as a transformation.
Blood as a raw material, as a material that is used, processed and utilized, and blood as a mystery that points beyond its substance into transcendent dimensions: The ambiguity that manifests itself here is not just a personal experience of Oberkofler’s; rather, it is part of the basic cultural make-up of Christian societies. It was not least painting that illustrated the connection between material presence and metaphysical meaning and anchored it in the collective consciousness. The stigmata of the crucified Christ were depicted in countless panel paintings. Even in sculptural works such as the crucifix in the Cistercian monastery of Maulbronn, the blood is emphasized as part of the message of salvation, both in the figurative and direct sense of the word. The veins, swollen under the weight of the body, are chiseled out of the stone in great detail, with the sculptural realism supported and enhanced by painting: Drops of blood on the face, blood running down the thighs and feet.¹
In the Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque periods, the depiction of bloody moments in painting experienced a dramatic and highly theatrical heightening, particularly in the paintings depicting the beheading of John the Baptist² or illustrating the Old Testament story of Judith and Holofernes³. Both events—as drastically unambiguous as they are depicted—are set in the context of Christian theology. While the beheading of the Assyrian general Holofernes, for example, is interpreted in the Counter-Reformation “as the triumph of faith over heresy”⁴, the murder of John is seen as a foreshadowing of the sacrificial death of Christ, which John himself announced by calling Jesus, who was only half a year younger, the “Lamb of God”.⁵ In this function as a sacrificial animal, Jan and Hubert van Eyck placed the Agnus Dei at the center of their Ghent altarpiece, thereby illustrating the Christological twist of the bloody process: calm and unmoved, its head surrounded by an aureole and turned towards the viewer, the lamb stands on an altar while blood flows from its breast into a chalice. Immediate realism merges with the mystery of faith. The van Eyck brothers depicted it on the basis of the Revelation of St. John the Evangelist in a paradisiacal ideal landscape, which presents itself as a “landscape space that continues into infinity”⁶.
When Gabriela Oberkofler focuses on blood in her work, it is not only against the background of a double experience—here the practice of slaughter as part of everyday life in the countryside, there the doctrine of transubstantiation conveyed in church services, which (for many perhaps only subconsciously) seeps into the cultural self-image. In fact, the Christian-religious part of this dual experience itself operates with an ambivalence: on the one hand, there is talk of blood as matter; on the other, its material existence is abolished, transcended. Oberkofler gets to the heart of this connection in her filmic work Die Lebens(Linie) by condensing it into a drop of blood. Continuously falling in a loop, slowly, steadily, falling over and over again, the drop appears as a condensate of everything that is connotatively inherent in the term “blood”.
In the silent gliding of the red drop, physical presence and spiritual mystery seem to merge, brought together in a minimal amount of vital fluid. The work is thus not only closer to the meditative mood of the Ghent Altarpiece than, for example, the decapitation scenarios of a Cesare da Sesto⁷ or an Artemisia Gentileschi⁸, it also stands in marked contrast to what is probably the most intensive use of blood in contemporary art—the actions and pourings of Hermann Nitsch. In the psychoanalytically inspired Orgien Mysterien Theater (OMT), which Nitsch understands as an “aesthetic ritual of the glorification of existence”⁹, ample space is given to “slaughter-warm blood” alongside “raw meat, moist, warm intestines”¹⁰ and other substances. Thus each of these events, declared as a festival and defined as a play of abreaction lasting several days, refers to archaic sacrificial rituals, but not, as Nitsch expressly emphasizes, in order to head for the hopelessness of catastrophe inherent in the ancient concept of tragedy, but rather “the world as a whole is to be accepted with all its extremes, its possibilities of happiness, atrocities and the cruelty of death.”¹¹.
Ritual moments can also be found in the work of Marina Abramović, to which Gabriela Oberkofler has created a striking reference in her work Salten / Dolomiten (2008). Oberkofler adopts the setting of Abramović’s video work Hero (2001),¹² in which the artist stages herself sitting on a white horse with a large white flag as a kind of peace Amazon. Abramović repeatedly deals with war and violence in her work, partly for biographical reasons: The artist's parents fought as partisans against the German occupation during the Second World War. She has been familiar with weapons since her youth,¹³ in her mid-20s (when she completed her studies) she began to use her body as material.¹⁴ Blood and pain became components of her work; in 1973, she cut a five-pointed star into her abdominal wall with a razor blade. And blood remained her means of expression: when Marina Abramović fell in love with Ulay in 1975 (“strong attraction”),¹⁵ the two sealed their new bond with bodily fluids that stood for life and vitality: “red drop of blood / white drop of sperm / deciding to live and work / together.”¹⁶
This now art-historical reminiscence also echoes in the echo chamber of associations and connotations of Gabriela Oberkofler’s work Die Lebens(Linie) mit dem fortlaufend sanft sinkenden Blutstropfen. And yet it would be too short-sighted to understand this work solely in terms of its biographical, art-historical or Christian-theological aspects. Such a narrow approach would not do justice to Oberkofler, if only because the artist uses a broad spectrum of aesthetic forms of articulation, all of which can be traced back to a highly developed sensorium for cultural, social or ecological circumstances. Whether as a draughtswoman, she presents the vulnerability of nature with meticulous delicacy or, with her photo series Versteckelus mit Pfarrer Müller (2009), elevates the forbidden children’s game of hide-and-seek in the church to the subject of a pictorial narrative in a kind of re-enactment, whether she encourages the population to bake, boil and pickle, as in her action Die kollektive Speisekammer (2012)¹⁷, to ultimately celebrate a large communal feast, or whether in her installation la tourtourelle (2014) she combines a birdcage scribbled together from small branches with fruit crates and a TV monitor—the artist always moves close to people, animals and things with her aesthetic manifestations and just as close to the conditions, cultural influences and social practices under which they exist.
She does not shy away from bloody reality. A fundamental feature of Gabriela Oberkofler’s work is its proximity to elemental creatureliness, which also includes empathy with animals and plants. This is translated, for example, into a carpet of flowers made from plants that have been bred for trade and imported from Africa or elsewhere, but can no longer be sold. They would normally be thrown on the compost heap, but Oberkofler gives them a new meaning, enhances them, even sacralizes them, at least if you think of the carpets of flowers that are laid out during Corpus Christi processions in areas that are committed to the Catholic faith. However, the semantic frame of reference for the flower carpet with the title Damascina Rose is less to be found in southern Germany, Austria or Tyrol than in the globalized status quo: Oberkofler procures the majority of the flowers from a florist whose family has an Arab cultural background. This circumstance is not simply left as an exotic coincidence, but Oberkofler makes it the starting point of a multi-layered concept that encompasses not only an ecological but also a social and intercultural moment—in such a way that the artist uses the drawing of a prayer rug that Duaa Faour, the daughter of the Berlin florist, made for Gabriela Oberkofler as a template when laying out the flowers, grasses and stems.¹⁸
The artist is similarly circumspect in her approach to fauna, taking different aspects into account. Again, her empathy is directed towards the devalued and disregarded. Just as cut flowers lose their commodity value as well as their admiration as ornaments, jewelry or festive decorations and at some point are treated as nothing more than waste, animals are robbed of their dignity as living beings, partly out of calculation, partly out of ignorance, or killed en passant, even if it is because they are literally run over on the highway. Oberkofler has created graphic memorials to these often overlooked victims of civilization, for example by laying out a row of dead insects next to each other like the track of game shot after a hunt and depicting them with a fine line. Fallen Down (2013) is the laconic title. It is neutral, although the creative approach itself signals respect or, to put it pathetically, reverence for life. As she constructs her drawings from countless small particles and terse graphisms, Oberkofler needs hours, days, weeks for her drawings, depending on the format. To put it bluntly: she sacrifices a lot of time for the victims. And by spending this time, she pays tribute to them.
How the artist integrates individual motifs into broader contexts is exemplified by her exhibition Blut im Schuh, which she set up at the Hospitalhof Stuttgart in 2009.¹⁹ An aviary there temporarily housed three carrier pigeons from the Odenwald. They were used to link the fairytale-like appeal of the title with the acute present. The “blood in the shoe” refers to the fairy tale of “Cinderella”, as passed down by the Brothers Grimm, in which pigeons appear as knowledgeable messengers of truth. The link between an originally orally transmitted myth and the factual reality of the present correlates with Oberkofler’s intention to raise awareness of the ambiguous relationship between the human species and the Columbidae family. Today, pigeons are often regarded as an urban nuisance, whereas in the 1950s - based on a long cultural tradition and also thanks to Pablo Picasso's drawings—they were still respected as a symbol of peace. In Oberkofler's work, this change is expressed by the fact that the doves no longer refer to blood in the shoe as in the fairy tale (and thus expose the wrong bride), but bleed themselves.²⁰ One could derive the question from this: If the dove no longer symbolizes peaceful coexistence, how do 21st century societies as a whole feel about their disposition towards peace? Do they perhaps prefer to rely on violence after all?
Mostly, but not always, it is dots that Oberkofler places on the sheet with a felt-tip pen or a brush dipped in watercolour. The picture is created dot by dot. The drop of blood in the work Die Lebens(Linie) resembles a return of these abstract dots to a tangible, tangible reality. A reality that oscillates between life and death. The victims of wars and terrorist attacks can report on it, as can paramedics who are dependent on blood reserves during their missions, or neurologists and psychiatrists who are confronted with self-injurious behavior (SVV).²¹ Gabriela Oberkofler also gets to the heart of this, in addition to all the cultural-historical and socio-critical aspects, with a drop of blood in its endless cycle.
1 see Reto Krüger: Das Maulbronner Kruzifix.Verlag am Klostertor Maulbronn 2018, pp. 17ff.
2 For an introduction to the iconography of the story of St. John, see Sabine Poeschel: Handbuch der Ikonographie. Sacred and profane themes in the visual arts. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt ³2009, p. 130ff.
3 on Judith and Holofernes see Poeschel, Handbuch, op. cit. p. 94ff.
4 as note 3, p. 95
5 John, 1,29
6 Otto Pächt: Van Eyck. The Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, ed. by Maria Schnidt-Dengler. Prestel Verlag Munich 1989, p. 146
7 Cesare da Sesto: Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, c. 1512 / 1516, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Inv. Gemäldegalerie, 202
8 Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith and Holofernes, 1612, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
9 Website of the artist, http://www.nitsch.org/aboutactions/, last accessed November 14, 2019
10 ibid.
11 ibid.
12 Michael Hübl: Jenseits von Jesenien, https://gabrielaoberkofler.de/texte/jenseits-von-jenesien, originally published in: Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst. There is also something of a precursor to Abramović's Hero: in Veit Harlan's film Opfergang (1944), Kristina Söderbaum can be seen in white swimwear on a white horse against a seaside backdrop; on her left hand she holds a sports bow.
13 s. Marina Abramović: Biography.Cantz Verlag Ostfildern 1994, p. 12 (“father giving me pistol / teaching me to shoot / games with knives”)
14 as note 13, p. 15
15 as note 13, p. 25
16 ibid.
17 The exhibition The Collective Pantry - by and with Gabriela Oberkofler took place from March 18, 2012 to May 20, 2012 at Museum Art.Plus, Donaueschingen.
18 Oberkofler's work Prinzeninsel Istanbul was created in 2009 with a comparable intercultural approach.
19 Blood in the Shoe - Gabriela Oberkofler, exhibition at Hospitalhof Stuttgart, September 18 to October 18, 2009
20 Both detailed and informative discussions of this body of work are provided by Helmut A. Müller: Gabriela Oberkofler - Blut im Schuh, in: Gabriela Oberkofler - Blut im Schuh, catalog for the above-mentioned exhibition, no p., and Annett Reckert: In einem Haus, wo eine Taube wohnt, ibid.
21 Neurologists and psychiatrists on the net: Causes of Self-Injurious Behavior, https://www.neurologen-und-psychiater-im-netz.org/kinder-jugend-psychiatrie/warnzeichen/selbstverletzendes-verhalten/moeglicheursachen/, last accessed November 27, 2019
A drop of blood
Michael Hübl
The knife to the carotid artery was familiar to her: anyone who grows up under conditions that Gabriela Oberkofler experienced as normal in her childhood and youth must develop a dialectical relationship with blood. Normal here means: in accordance with common practice, following generally accepted social norms. In the rural areas of South Tyrol, at least during the 1980s and 1990s, this normality still included slaughtering. The butcher starts, stabs, the blood pulses out in a powerful stream. Someone is already waiting to catch it in a bowl, because it is precious. Life becomes food. The heat dissipates, the animal is dismembered. What remains is meat.
A second encounter with blood is also part of young Gabriela Oberkofler’s experience. During the obligatory visits to church services in the village community, she is also confronted with the moment of fundamental change—the change from life to death, death to life. According to the Roman Catholic view, a transubstantiation takes place in the Eucharist: the bread of the host becomes the body of Christ, the wine becomes his blood. A completed historical event (Jesus’ death on the cross) is actualized through the liturgical event at the altar and is intended to become an acute reality of life. The action is realized as a transformation.
Blood as a raw material, as a material that is used, processed and utilized, and blood as a mystery that points beyond its substance into transcendent dimensions: The ambiguity that manifests itself here is not just a personal experience of Oberkofler’s; rather, it is part of the basic cultural make-up of Christian societies. It was not least painting that illustrated the connection between material presence and metaphysical meaning and anchored it in the collective consciousness. The stigmata of the crucified Christ were depicted in countless panel paintings. Even in sculptural works such as the crucifix in the Cistercian monastery of Maulbronn, the blood is emphasized as part of the message of salvation, both in the figurative and direct sense of the word. The veins, swollen under the weight of the body, are chiseled out of the stone in great detail, with the sculptural realism supported and enhanced by painting: Drops of blood on the face, blood running down the thighs and feet.¹
In the Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque periods, the depiction of bloody moments in painting experienced a dramatic and highly theatrical heightening, particularly in the paintings depicting the beheading of John the Baptist² or illustrating the Old Testament story of Judith and Holofernes³. Both events—as drastically unambiguous as they are depicted—are set in the context of Christian theology. While the beheading of the Assyrian general Holofernes, for example, is interpreted in the Counter-Reformation “as the triumph of faith over heresy”⁴, the murder of John is seen as a foreshadowing of the sacrificial death of Christ, which John himself announced by calling Jesus, who was only half a year younger, the “Lamb of God”.⁵ In this function as a sacrificial animal, Jan and Hubert van Eyck placed the Agnus Dei at the center of their Ghent altarpiece, thereby illustrating the Christological twist of the bloody process: calm and unmoved, its head surrounded by an aureole and turned towards the viewer, the lamb stands on an altar while blood flows from its breast into a chalice. Immediate realism merges with the mystery of faith. The van Eyck brothers depicted it on the basis of the Revelation of St. John the Evangelist in a paradisiacal ideal landscape, which presents itself as a “landscape space that continues into infinity”⁶.
When Gabriela Oberkofler focuses on blood in her work, it is not only against the background of a double experience—here the practice of slaughter as part of everyday life in the countryside, there the doctrine of transubstantiation conveyed in church services, which (for many perhaps only subconsciously) seeps into the cultural self-image. In fact, the Christian-religious part of this dual experience itself operates with an ambivalence: on the one hand, there is talk of blood as matter; on the other, its material existence is abolished, transcended. Oberkofler gets to the heart of this connection in her filmic work Die Lebens(Linie) by condensing it into a drop of blood. Continuously falling in a loop, slowly, steadily, falling over and over again, the drop appears as a condensate of everything that is connotatively inherent in the term “blood”.
In the silent gliding of the red drop, physical presence and spiritual mystery seem to merge, brought together in a minimal amount of vital fluid. The work is thus not only closer to the meditative mood of the Ghent Altarpiece than, for example, the decapitation scenarios of a Cesare da Sesto⁷ or an Artemisia Gentileschi⁸, it also stands in marked contrast to what is probably the most intensive use of blood in contemporary art—the actions and pourings of Hermann Nitsch. In the psychoanalytically inspired Orgien Mysterien Theater (OMT), which Nitsch understands as an “aesthetic ritual of the glorification of existence”⁹, ample space is given to “slaughter-warm blood” alongside “raw meat, moist, warm intestines”¹⁰ and other substances. Thus each of these events, declared as a festival and defined as a play of abreaction lasting several days, refers to archaic sacrificial rituals, but not, as Nitsch expressly emphasizes, in order to head for the hopelessness of catastrophe inherent in the ancient concept of tragedy, but rather “the world as a whole is to be accepted with all its extremes, its possibilities of happiness, atrocities and the cruelty of death.”¹¹.
Ritual moments can also be found in the work of Marina Abramović, to which Gabriela Oberkofler has created a striking reference in her work Salten / Dolomiten (2008). Oberkofler adopts the setting of Abramović’s video work Hero (2001),¹² in which the artist stages herself sitting on a white horse with a large white flag as a kind of peace Amazon. Abramović repeatedly deals with war and violence in her work, partly for biographical reasons: The artist's parents fought as partisans against the German occupation during the Second World War. She has been familiar with weapons since her youth,¹³ in her mid-20s (when she completed her studies) she began to use her body as material.¹⁴ Blood and pain became components of her work; in 1973, she cut a five-pointed star into her abdominal wall with a razor blade. And blood remained her means of expression: when Marina Abramović fell in love with Ulay in 1975 (“strong attraction”),¹⁵ the two sealed their new bond with bodily fluids that stood for life and vitality: “red drop of blood / white drop of sperm / deciding to live and work / together.”¹⁶
This now art-historical reminiscence also echoes in the echo chamber of associations and connotations of Gabriela Oberkofler’s work Die Lebens(Linie) mit dem fortlaufend sanft sinkenden Blutstropfen. And yet it would be too short-sighted to understand this work solely in terms of its biographical, art-historical or Christian-theological aspects. Such a narrow approach would not do justice to Oberkofler, if only because the artist uses a broad spectrum of aesthetic forms of articulation, all of which can be traced back to a highly developed sensorium for cultural, social or ecological circumstances. Whether as a draughtswoman, she presents the vulnerability of nature with meticulous delicacy or, with her photo series Versteckelus mit Pfarrer Müller (2009), elevates the forbidden children’s game of hide-and-seek in the church to the subject of a pictorial narrative in a kind of re-enactment, whether she encourages the population to bake, boil and pickle, as in her action Die kollektive Speisekammer (2012)¹⁷, to ultimately celebrate a large communal feast, or whether in her installation la tourtourelle (2014) she combines a birdcage scribbled together from small branches with fruit crates and a TV monitor—the artist always moves close to people, animals and things with her aesthetic manifestations and just as close to the conditions, cultural influences and social practices under which they exist.
She does not shy away from bloody reality. A fundamental feature of Gabriela Oberkofler’s work is its proximity to elemental creatureliness, which also includes empathy with animals and plants. This is translated, for example, into a carpet of flowers made from plants that have been bred for trade and imported from Africa or elsewhere, but can no longer be sold. They would normally be thrown on the compost heap, but Oberkofler gives them a new meaning, enhances them, even sacralizes them, at least if you think of the carpets of flowers that are laid out during Corpus Christi processions in areas that are committed to the Catholic faith. However, the semantic frame of reference for the flower carpet with the title Damascina Rose is less to be found in southern Germany, Austria or Tyrol than in the globalized status quo: Oberkofler procures the majority of the flowers from a florist whose family has an Arab cultural background. This circumstance is not simply left as an exotic coincidence, but Oberkofler makes it the starting point of a multi-layered concept that encompasses not only an ecological but also a social and intercultural moment—in such a way that the artist uses the drawing of a prayer rug that Duaa Faour, the daughter of the Berlin florist, made for Gabriela Oberkofler as a template when laying out the flowers, grasses and stems.¹⁸
The artist is similarly circumspect in her approach to fauna, taking different aspects into account. Again, her empathy is directed towards the devalued and disregarded. Just as cut flowers lose their commodity value as well as their admiration as ornaments, jewelry or festive decorations and at some point are treated as nothing more than waste, animals are robbed of their dignity as living beings, partly out of calculation, partly out of ignorance, or killed en passant, even if it is because they are literally run over on the highway. Oberkofler has created graphic memorials to these often overlooked victims of civilization, for example by laying out a row of dead insects next to each other like the track of game shot after a hunt and depicting them with a fine line. Fallen Down (2013) is the laconic title. It is neutral, although the creative approach itself signals respect or, to put it pathetically, reverence for life. As she constructs her drawings from countless small particles and terse graphisms, Oberkofler needs hours, days, weeks for her drawings, depending on the format. To put it bluntly: she sacrifices a lot of time for the victims. And by spending this time, she pays tribute to them.
How the artist integrates individual motifs into broader contexts is exemplified by her exhibition Blut im Schuh, which she set up at the Hospitalhof Stuttgart in 2009.¹⁹ An aviary there temporarily housed three carrier pigeons from the Odenwald. They were used to link the fairytale-like appeal of the title with the acute present. The “blood in the shoe” refers to the fairy tale of “Cinderella”, as passed down by the Brothers Grimm, in which pigeons appear as knowledgeable messengers of truth. The link between an originally orally transmitted myth and the factual reality of the present correlates with Oberkofler’s intention to raise awareness of the ambiguous relationship between the human species and the Columbidae family. Today, pigeons are often regarded as an urban nuisance, whereas in the 1950s - based on a long cultural tradition and also thanks to Pablo Picasso's drawings—they were still respected as a symbol of peace. In Oberkofler's work, this change is expressed by the fact that the doves no longer refer to blood in the shoe as in the fairy tale (and thus expose the wrong bride), but bleed themselves.²⁰ One could derive the question from this: If the dove no longer symbolizes peaceful coexistence, how do 21st century societies as a whole feel about their disposition towards peace? Do they perhaps prefer to rely on violence after all?
Mostly, but not always, it is dots that Oberkofler places on the sheet with a felt-tip pen or a brush dipped in watercolour. The picture is created dot by dot. The drop of blood in the work Die Lebens(Linie) resembles a return of these abstract dots to a tangible, tangible reality. A reality that oscillates between life and death. The victims of wars and terrorist attacks can report on it, as can paramedics who are dependent on blood reserves during their missions, or neurologists and psychiatrists who are confronted with self-injurious behavior (SVV).²¹ Gabriela Oberkofler also gets to the heart of this, in addition to all the cultural-historical and socio-critical aspects, with a drop of blood in its endless cycle.
1 see Reto Krüger: Das Maulbronner Kruzifix.Verlag am Klostertor Maulbronn 2018, pp. 17ff.
2 For an introduction to the iconography of the story of St. John, see Sabine Poeschel: Handbuch der Ikonographie. Sacred and profane themes in the visual arts. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt ³2009, p. 130ff.
3 on Judith and Holofernes see Poeschel, Handbuch, op. cit. p. 94ff.
4 as note 3, p. 95
5 John, 1,29
6 Otto Pächt: Van Eyck. The Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, ed. by Maria Schnidt-Dengler. Prestel Verlag Munich 1989, p. 146
7 Cesare da Sesto: Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, c. 1512 / 1516, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Inv. Gemäldegalerie, 202
8 Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith and Holofernes, 1612, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
9 Website of the artist, http://www.nitsch.org/aboutactions/, last accessed November 14, 2019
10 ibid.
11 ibid.
12 Michael Hübl: Jenseits von Jesenien, https://gabrielaoberkofler.de/texte/jenseits-von-jenesien, originally published in: Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst. There is also something of a precursor to Abramović's Hero: in Veit Harlan's film Opfergang (1944), Kristina Söderbaum can be seen in white swimwear on a white horse against a seaside backdrop; on her left hand she holds a sports bow.
13 s. Marina Abramović: Biography.Cantz Verlag Ostfildern 1994, p. 12 (“father giving me pistol / teaching me to shoot / games with knives”)
14 as note 13, p. 15
15 as note 13, p. 25
16 ibid.
17 The exhibition The Collective Pantry - by and with Gabriela Oberkofler took place from March 18, 2012 to May 20, 2012 at Museum Art.Plus, Donaueschingen.
18 Oberkofler's work Prinzeninsel Istanbul was created in 2009 with a comparable intercultural approach.
19 Blood in the Shoe - Gabriela Oberkofler, exhibition at Hospitalhof Stuttgart, September 18 to October 18, 2009
20 Both detailed and informative discussions of this body of work are provided by Helmut A. Müller: Gabriela Oberkofler - Blut im Schuh, in: Gabriela Oberkofler - Blut im Schuh, catalog for the above-mentioned exhibition, no p., and Annett Reckert: In einem Haus, wo eine Taube wohnt, ibid.
21 Neurologists and psychiatrists on the net: Causes of Self-Injurious Behavior, https://www.neurologen-und-psychiater-im-netz.org/kinder-jugend-psychiatrie/warnzeichen/selbstverletzendes-verhalten/moeglicheursachen/, last accessed November 27, 2019