2023-08-01 06:46:04
Ana Mendieta did not have an easy fate. Born in Havana in 1948, she was one of the 14,000 children exfiltrated from Cuba to the United States between 1960 and 1962, as part of Operation Peter Pan (1). The story of this singular uprooting explains, in part, the strength and, at the same time, the sweetness that emerge from his works, visible until September 10, at MO.CO. (Contemporary Montpellier) La Panacée, in Montpellier.
If the exhibition gives a large place to Silhouette by Ana Mendieta, a series that made her famous, she also reveals, for the first time, the paintings made during her art studies when she was only about twenty years old. These thirty paintings already offer an assumed femininity, marked by bright colors and coarse lines inspired by pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican art. Then, Ana will forever lay down the brushes and finally find her place by staging herself in front of the lens of a camera or a video camera.
From presence to erasure
In performances dating from the early 1970s, Ana Mendieta exhibits her own body, naked, facing the grass or behind a glass plate, in a filmed and photographed scenography. Throughout the exhibition, we feel his art mature, assert itself. First at the center of her photographs, Ana Mendieta then fades away, to the benefit of the imprint of her single silhouette left here and there in different natural environments. :
The shape of his body becomes one with the rock or with a tree. The foam of a pond rounds out following the trace of a face. Two frail arms stand out in relief in the green moss on the surface of the water. Elsewhere, her bright red silhouette strikes the eye like a volcano or softens on the contrary, merging the curves of her femininity with the landscape. So many performances documented by photos, videos and slides.
A tragic fall
“She uses earth, pigments, plants, paint, inspired by rock art, she illustrates herself and interacts with the landscapes”, commented Numa Hambursin, director of MO.CO., who had the students of the Montpellier School of Fine Arts faithfully reproduce an installation by the artist dated 1978 and made of wood, earth and pine. Water, earth, air and fire constitute, in all of Ana Mendieta’s works, a force that will not leave her until her premature death, at only 36 years old.
That day, in New York, in the apartment of her artist husband Carl André, after a very alcoholic dinner and a violent argument, Ana Mendieta fell from the 34th floor. After a trial, her husband will be acquitted on the grounds of a “reasonable doubt”but feminists will seize on this tragic death and denounce a feminicide hidden by the patriarchal system.
The work behind fate
By choosing to exhibit Ana Mendieta at MO.CO., after the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2018, Numa Hambursin is campaigning for the artist’s work to supplant the sordid story of her disappearance. “Ana’s death has become a symbol, yet few know of her work. However, one cannot establish Ana as a feminist without taking an interest in her creations, he believes. The work cannot be erased in the face of history. »
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