Ana Mendieta

Tate Modern’s major exhibition of Ana Mendieta brings together more than 150 works across film, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. The presentation follows the artist’s radical development of an “earth-body” practice in which the human figure, landscape and natural materials are treated as interconnected.

At the centre of the exhibition are works from the celebrated Silueta series, created through interventions in sand, earth, fire, water, flowers and other organic matter. These works often survive only through photographs and films, making documentation itself part of the artistic process.

Mendieta’s practice is closely connected to questions of displacement, ritual, gender and belonging. Born in Cuba and sent to the United States as a child, she repeatedly used bodily absence and temporary traces to think through identity and place. The exhibition also expands attention beyond the best-known earth-body works to include early paintings, experimental films and sculptural projects.

Seen across the breadth of her career, Mendieta’s work resists easy categorisation. Performance, Land Art, feminism, spirituality and ecology intersect without fully containing the practice, which remains strikingly contemporary in its treatment of the body as both material and site of memory.

Image credit: Ana Mendieta, Imágen de Yágul, Mexico, 1973. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by DACS.