Robert Draws – Blood has long been one of the most provocative and symbolically rich materials in the history of modern and contemporary art. Despite its everyday presence, blood remains a shocking element when incorporated into art practices, embodying the tension between life and death. Since the 1970s, artists have used blood as both metaphor and substance to interrogate issues such as gender identity, disease, racism and violence. Blood as a liminal substance blurs boundaries between masculinity and femininity, vitality and threat, or nutrition and destruction. Many artists also engage with blood to address questions of memory, inheritance and history tied to race, class and national identity. The power of blood to simultaneously divide and unite communities allows it to disrupt traditional categories of art and social discourse. Through this material, contemporary artists open a complex conversation on the multiplicity of identities and histories present in today’s cultural landscape.
Blood has positioned itself as a potent meeting point between art history and multiple disciplines such as anthropology, performance studies, cultural studies and medical humanities. This interdisciplinary resonance makes blood an ideal medium to examine the construction of identities and the narratives of trauma in global contexts. The session discussed here brings together four papers that investigate how blood, artists and art intersect with national and international traumas, menstruation, disease and biotechnology. By exploring these intersections, blood becomes a channel through which artists confront issues not only of corporeality but also of social structures, challenging audiences to engage with deeper ethical questions. These conversations highlight how contemporary practices are shaped by both personal experiences and broader historical currents, making blood a unique symbol of connection between individual and collective histories.
The first paper focuses on Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, who uses human remains and materials from corpses to expose the systemic violence tied to the War on Drugs. Margolles, who once worked as an autopsy technician, accessed these elements to underscore the complicity of state institutions in perpetuating cartel violence. Her 2009 Venice Biennale installation featured cloths taken from mass graves and a worker mopping the exhibition floor with fluids from murder victims. These actions forced international audiences to confront their own role in sustaining the violence through drug demand. Margolles employs these substances not as spectacle but as testimony, transforming the gallery into a site of mourning and indictment. Her work exemplifies how artists critique the global distribution of violence and the narratives that confine it to national borders rather than international complicity.
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Bee Hughes presents a body of work addressing menstruation as a site of cultural stigma and secrecy. Through projects like Cycles she documents her own non-normative menstrual cycles using expanded printmaking and performance gestures. Hughes challenges the medicalised and commercialised narratives that frame menstruation as something to be hidden. Her artworks resist essentialist readings of menstrual experience and instead reveal its complexity, showing how the politics of this bodily process extends into gender and social norms. By combining cut-up poetry and sound works that reappropriate online medical advice, Hughes reclaims language around menstruation for artistic exploration. Her practice situates menstrual art within a wider movement of consciousness raising but critiques how celebration alone can perpetuate stereotypes. In doing so she opens up a more nuanced conversation about the body, identity and the role of this natural cycle in feminist and contemporary art practices.
The final paper explores how artists respond to advances in biotechnology and the extraction of genomic data from blood. Figures such as Katy Connor, Jeroen Van Loon and Tom Corby use blood not only as a visceral material but also as a data source that raises ethical concerns about ownership and privacy. Connor’s installations derive forms from digital scans of her own blood, while Van Loon’s Cellout.me project auctioned DNA data to the highest bidder.
Corby transformed his medical test results into visual works through Blood and Bones, turning clinical data into aesthetic expressions. He explored the tension between the personal and the impersonal, as society increasingly represents the body through numbers and code. Contemporary artists use this approach to highlight how medical systems shape and define personhood within the context of personalised healthcare and bio-capital. They position art historical knowledge as a critical tool that actively contributes to interdisciplinary discussions.
This article is sourced from forarthistory.org.uk and for more details you can read at robertdraws
Writer: Sarah Azhari
Editor: Anisa
