Viewing Ana Mendieta

Body meets earth.

Tate Modern stages the UK’s first major exhibition in more than a decade dedicated to Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American artist whose work remains startlingly alive even today. Active in the 1970s and 1980s, Mendieta challenged the boundaries of sculpture, photography, film and performance, often using her own body in direct relationship with the natural world. Her life was cut short in 1985 at the age of 36, when she died after falling from her New York apartment in circumstances that remain the subject of enduring public debate.


The exhibition brings together more than 120 works, arranged through symbolic locations that trace key moments in her career. Mendieta is best known for her earth-body works, a term she used for works in which her body or its outline was marked into the landscape using earth, fire, flowers, water and other natural materials. Her Silueta Series, begun in Mexico in 1973, appears throughout the show, from early works where flowers cover the artist’s body to later traces pressed into riverbanks and shorelines.

Mendieta’s sense of origin was inseparable from exile. Born in Havana in 1948, she was sent to the United States with her sister at the age of 12, separated from her parents and homeland after the Cuban Revolution. This experience of displacement runs through works such as Ochún (1981), where a sand figure on the Florida shoreline looks towards the waters between the US and Cuba, and Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures), made after her return visits to Cuba in the 1980s.

The show also gives fresh attention to Mendieta’s films, with newly remastered works made between 1971 and 1981 premiering in the UK. These sit alongside rarely seen paintings and drawings, late sculptures made after her Prix de Rome fellowship, and restaged installations that allow visitors to encounter the living, temporary quality of her practice. Ñañigo Burial, a Silueta made from black ritual candles, will be lit regularly during the exhibition, while a tree sculpture will be brought to life outside Tate Modern. Over four decades after her death, Mendieta’s work still asks urgent questions about body, land, exile and return. Unmissable.