Ana Mendieta: the second major retrospective in London
Updated: Sep 7
As you walk into the first room of the Ana Mendieta exhibition at Tate Modern, you experience an eerie tension. The room feels empty; it’s a large space with a film showing on a small screen in the far corner, some photographs and a flat sculpture placed in the middle. You begin to encounter her by zigzagging through the body of her works, jumping chronologically.
You encounter Mendieta first as a trace, then as a body, and finally as something that exceeds the corporeal altogether. What remains is an encounter with earth, blood, sand, water, fire, stone. And absence.
This is Tate Modern’s first exhibition devoted to Mendieta and the largest UK presentation of her work in more than a decade. It follows Traces at the Hayward Gallery in 2013, the first UK retrospective of the artist. The 2026 Tate survey brings together around 150 works across film, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture and reconstructed ephemeral installations. Rather than following a simple chronology, it moves through places and states: the grove, the river, the cave, the threshold, reflecting how Mendieta herself thought about her practice.
Despite the constant questioning of identity, the notion of displacement and the lack of wholeness, she manages to complete herself by merging with nature. It is impossible to escape the presence of the elements: fire, water, soil, and air. Ever since her studies in Iowa, Ana felt a calling to nature and was conscious of the ability to rediscover her own self through it. The stills and films from the famous Silueta series dominate each room, reminding us of the constant search that Ana was on.
Finding by disappearing
Born in Havana in 1948, Mendieta was sent to the United States as a child. Displacement became inseparable from her continuous search for origin. At the University of Iowa she worked with performance, photography and film, testing what happened when the body was covered, marked, hidden or transformed by organic matter. Mud, grass, blood, feathers, flowers and fire became materials through which identity could be made and unmade.
That movement leads to the Silueta Series, begun in 1973. The silhouette is not simply a silhouette of a woman. It is an image produced through disappearance: a body-shaped hollow in the earth, a figure made from flowers, a form burnt into the ground, or a red outline that the landscape will eventually erase. Mendieta repeatedly asks whether belonging requires permanence at all.
The effect is strangely intimate. Even when the artist is absent, the dimensions of the silhouette imply her body. The viewer is left with a paradox: the less of Mendieta we can see, the more strongly we feel that she was there.
B(lo)ody art
Body Tracks (Blood Sign #2) (1974) is one of the works that makes Mendieta’s physical vocabulary unmistakable. Standing with her back to the camera, she raises her arms into an open Y-shaped position. Her hands and forearms are coated in a mixture of animal blood and tempera. She presses them to a pale surface and slowly drags herself downward, leaving two red tracks behind. The action is simple but extraordinarily charged. You feel the weight of the body, the pull of the earth and the transfer of matter from cloth to surface. Once Mendieta leaves, only a residue survives, a reminder of a body that was there.
The use of blood in Mendieta’s work is countless and significant. She was raised around Catholic imagery and Afro-Cuban religious traditions in which blood signify sacrifice, ritual and vital force.
Venus in Rome
By the early 1980s, Mendieta’s relationship to the earth was becoming increasingly archaeological. She travelled to prehistoric sites across Europe and looked towards ancient forms, female figures and the symbolic language of fertility and landscape.
In 1983 she received the Rome Prize and began a residency at the American Academy in Italy. The move brought a significant change: after years of deliberately temporary interventions, she began working more extensively in the studio with drawings, prints and sculpture.
The Labyrinth of Venus works belong to this later period. The Venus figure is an archetype associated with the female body, fertility and abundance, it is not just treated as a stable classical ideal. Mendieta excavates it and tinkers with it, introducing strangeness and novelty. The body becomes closer to a geological sign: a form emerging from earth, stone, pigment and memory. Much like the Venus of Willendorf, emerging from the dirt during an archaeological excavation in Lower Austria.
Seen alongside the Siluetas, these Venus works reveal a continuity. One disappears almost immediately; the other seeks greater material permanence and the other historical and mythological relevance. Both are concerned with the same movement between body and landscape, personal history and ancient memory. Her fascination with prehistoric art gives us some clues. Mendieta described her work as being in the tradition of Neolithic art, emphasising emotional and sensual experience rather than the formal qualities of materials. That helps explain why the work feels oddly outside its own period. She was making performance and land art in the 1970s, yet her imagination reached towards burial sites, fertility figures, ritual marks and the first human attempts to leave signs in the landscape.
Identity is everything
Mendieta rejected universal definitions, this included the definition of women’s experience. In her 1980 text Dialectics of Isolation, written in the context of A.I.R. Gallery, she argued that mainstream American feminism failed to account adequately for the different realities of women of colour. Race, culture and displacement were not secondary details, as they changed the meaning of oppression and therefore what feminist art, and feminism in general, needed to address.
Thus, politics is embedded in the materials of her art: whose body is visible, whose history is preserved, who gets to define the landscape, and what happens when the supposedly private female body becomes a public artistic medium. Mendieta resisted the boundaries of the gallery just as she resisted fixed categories of identity.
Not focusing on the subject of Mendieta’s death in the Tate exhibition is a commendable curatorial decision. Reading the Guardian review of the 2013 exhibition, the main topic of the discussion is her untimely passing and the family comments. It doesn’t only sensationalise the story around her, taking away from the contemplative and spiritual nature of her work, but it also goes against everything she believed in.
The press release from the Southbank Centre (for the 2013 show at the Hayward Gallery) starts with: “This autumn the Hayward Gallery presents Ana Mendieta: Traces, the UK’s first retrospective of one of the most significant yet unacknowledged artists of the 20th century.” We hope this is finally changing.
There is much more to see at the exhibition and we have just scratched the surface. An incredible artwork titled Ñañigo Burial 1976 which is ritualistically lit throughout the course of the exhibition and a recreation of one of the Silueta sculptures where the room transforms into an real forest.
Reading list from Rabbits’ Choice
Rites and Symbols of Initiation by Mircea Eliade – this book as inspiration for Mendiate in general and for some of her specific works including “Rites and Rituals of Initiation” made in 1978.
Women, Race and Class by Angela Y. Davis – Ana Mendieta was the creator of the Dialectics of Isolation (1980) at the A.I.R gallery in New York. Introduction in the introductory text to the exhibition, Mendieta articulates the subject of intersectionality and feminism.
Undermining: a Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West by Lucy R. Lippard – another person mentioned in the exhibition was Lucy R. Lippard, to whom Mendieta gave her work “Rites and Rituals of Initiation”. Lippard, being a writer and art critic, published some of the first articles on Mendieta’s work. She also published many other books, including Undermining, which sheds light on the toll of resource extraction, indigenous rights and the role of art in environmental activism.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado – Machado was heavily inspired by Mendieta to write this memoir. These two women, connected through their ties to Cuba and to Iowa, are bringing a deep sense of connection through their shape-shifting work.
Sources:
Artist website https://www.anamendietaartist.com/
Southbank Press Release from Google Arts & Culture https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ana-mendieta-traces-hayward-gallery/LAWBbugNB8ZiJw
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