7knotwind:

1. RYOKO SUZUKI—Bind 
   Bind shows a woman who has to deal with her female sexuality. In this series, Suzuki bound herself with pigskin, which had been soaked in her own blood as a symbol of womanhood. Suzuki has said this work speaks to her transformation from a child to a woman and addresses both the anxiety and ignorance she felt at this point in her life
2. MARINA ABRAMOVIC— Balkan Baroque
   The original piece was performed in the Venice as part of the Biennale— Abramović sat cleaning the bones, amid blood and stench.  The enormous, seemingly impossible and bloody task plays on her suffering, the artist’s inability to express or comprehend the enormity of the crimes and violence that make up her cultural history. 
3. ORLAN— carnal art 
   Orlan has undergone numerous plastic surgeries in an attempt to make herself look like her computer-generated collage, built from idealized figures from art history. The point, however, is not simply for Orlan literally to become a work of art—each operation is treated as a performance piece in its own right. Orlan only allows herself to be given local anesthetics and thus is able, from the operating table, to direct the transformation of the surgical theater into her personal performance space.
4. MARY COBLE— blood script
   Blood Script was a live performance piece that took place at the PULSE Art Fair at Pier 40 in New York City, New York in 2008. The artist meticulously documented inscriptions from three previous performances and compiled a list of over 200 hateful words and phrases that had been written on her in marker, by viewers, in various languages. For Blood Script, the artist had 75 of the most common words tattooed onto her skin, without ink. Using decorative letters, she attempts to play with the dichotomy between the beautiful visual form of the words and the ugly meanings they convey semantically.
   
   

*for ISSUES & IMAGES: flesh + blood lecture
a selection of female artists using blood as a medium in the production of art

likeafieldmouse:

Ismail Bahri - Blood Ink (2009)

Tiny, careful droplets of black ink “drawing” the pores and wrinkles of the artist’s subjects, like traces of time.