Ana Mendieta @ Tate Modern

Ana Mendieta, 

It's difficult to look at Ana Mendieta's art without seeing her death foretold. The current exhibition at Tate Modern does not mention her fall from the 34th floor of her apartment building in New York, widely believed to have been at the hands of her husband artist Carl Andre. I mention this because the work, made of blood, feathers, fire and earth is fiercely feminist and relentlessly searching for the expression of woman's connection to the ancient land and nature. As it is presented in this exhibition, Mendieta's art tells of a woman fighting to be heard amid the din of voices wanting to silence her. 

Ana Mendieta, Old Westbury, 1978, Recreated 2026

If ever there was an exhibition of a single artist's work to convince of the value of seeing the artist's development across a number of years, Tate Modern's presentation Mendieta's astonishing work shows this. The human form drawn, burnt, painted, traced and planted is always that of her own small body. More often than not, the shapes and images are vaginal, leaving no doubt that her primary concern centered on woman's place in the world, her body as an extension of nature, merged together in a spiritual harmony that has no place or need of men. In her sculptures, performances, films and drawings, trees, leaves, and the earth show the absence and silence of woman in a culturescape overwhelmed by men, as well as the violence committed on both her and nature. 

Ana Mendieta, La Concha de Venus, 1982

In, for example, La Concha de Venus (1982) the patterns of the earth give us the unmistakeable form of a woman and in the Silueta Series among othes, the woman's body is both the absent form and the clitoris of the earth. Absence is also found throughout Mendieta's oeuvre, so often the body being marked by a shadow, or a trace, a silhouette or just a negative space. And in these works, the silhouette or shadow is always removed from the body, the woman herself missing from the scene. Because she is absent, the violence is not explicit, but it is unmistakeable. 

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series, 1973-1980

While the form remains constant, the materials, location, the medium are always shifting. Perhaps most exciting in this exhibition are the screening of a number of Mendieta's short films. In them we see her transforming, emerging, drawing, always in motion, always in the process of creating or exploring the synergy of woman and nature. In one she slowly drags her blood soaked arms down a white wall creating traces like ancient hieroglyphs along the wall. There are clear references to archaeology, ancestral ritual and neolithic cultures, very old traditions both relating to her native Cuba and her American life. The works often resemble tombs and gravesites where fire and water and snow are in a process of the exchange of life force with woman's body. And we see spaces and places where silence, absence and invisibility are remembered—or not—as forms and traces are washed away. Like the woman's body. Erased.

Ana Mendieta, Film Still from Blood and Feathers, #2, 1974

Walking through the exhibition, there's a grief in all of the works, particularly for those aware of Mendieta's premature death. That said, Tate Modern and the curators are to be congratulated  for not drawing attention to her "fall" from a window, not adding any more sensation to her death that it already attracts. Because what Mendieta has to say in her art about the fragility and vulnerability, the oppression of woman, the violence to the environment and women alike, needs to be where our attention is focussed. It is an extraordinary oeuvre and exhibited with care and creativity by Tate Modern.