The art of Boris Lurie (* 1924, Leningrad) and Wolf Vostell (* 1932, Leverkusen) is determined by the break in civilization in Germany in 1933, which made the German genocide of German and European Jews (the Shoah) possible. Both artists make the Shoah the subject of their work in a radical way. They work - initially independently of one another - with the means of painting and during the 1950s they resort to the stylistic devices of the first avant-garde: Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism. They strategically employ collage and assembly techniques. Vostell later develops the subject further in the media of happening and video art while Lurie takes up writing. In 1964 the artists met in New York and entertained a lifelong friendship.

As a painter, filmmaker, and photographer, Ulrike Ottinger has created an entire artistic universe, a Cosmos Ottinger. Her transdisciplinary approach is groundbreaking today but Ottinger is also a pioneer of queer art, post-colonial criticism, and the confrontation with fascism and persecution. These questions are all still urgent today: How can we locate contemporary feminist, queer, and aesthetic debates historically? And how does one situate these debates in a museum setting? The catalogue, edited by the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, documents this part of her work but also addresses these theoretical and art historical questions raised by Ottinger's searching and investigative approach.

"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.