Zusammenspiel

“She, a woman of high beauty, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to escape her loneliness and to leave La Rotonda. She bought a ticket ‘Aller jamais retour. Berlin Tegel’.”

This is the opening scene of Ulrike Ottinger’s momentous 1979 film Ticket of No Return—the woman of high beauty was Tabea Blumenschein. Unconcerned by all conventions, Blumenschein adored transformation: in a distinctive, avant-garde aesthetic, the two women embraced various different identities and challenged many norms, in the process revealing the performativity of gender. Initiating a dialog between the two artists’ perspectives, these books bring together for the first time Blumenschein’s drawings with Ottinger’s photographs from their joint performance sessions.