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Working On A Miracle: Nine Attempts Of HIV-blood- And Saints Images
 

Bible stories often speak of miracles. And there is a very close connection to blood. I am thinking of – for example – the alleged blood miracles of the Southern Italian holy statues. At the end of the 1980’s, an intense discussion about Aids erupted in the Church. The Archbishop of Salzburg at this time characterized the disease as a punishment of God, similar to the times of the plague. But during the Middle Ages there were saints who knew how to ease the agony of the sick and to lessen the fear of those spared by the disease.

In reference to Aids, Susan Sontag stresses the enormous importance of freeing the sickness from the ‘dictatorship of meaning’! Here she is of course criticizing the church’s way of dealing with Aids as a punishment, rather than as a normal disease. In reaction to this fatal attribution, I work with figures or ciphers, which are encoded within this system of signs or beliefs. Holy figures – as in other religions as well – occupy a definite place in the repository of traditional Christian iconography and narratives. I work with them, but turn them against the church’s perversion of their power of meaning, which has made its way deep into society.

Christoph Burtscher

"An affecting and authentic work." (Neues Deutschland)