I must confess that when I first heard about the latest Tate Modern show I felt a quiet twinge of scepticism. Another big institutional survey, another chance for curators to wrap an artist in the language of the moment. Yet walking through the new Ana Mendieta exhibition, which opened on 15 July and runs until 17 January next year, one encounters something more substantial than trend.
The show gathers more than 120 works. It is the first major British exhibition dedicated to her in over a decade. What strikes you immediately is how little the pieces seem to care about our current ideological weather. Instead they return, again and again, to the same elemental concerns: displacement, origin, the body pressed against landscape, the fleeting mark left on soil or rock or water.
Mendieta was born in Havana in 1948 and sent into exile in the United States at the age of 12. That rupture never really left her. The exhibition arranges itself thematically around symbolic locations that reveal her persistent engagement with the natural world. Earth, fire, flowers and her own silhouette become the raw materials. The Silueta series from 1973 to 1980 remains central, those haunting traces of a female form pressed into grass, sand or snow only to dissolve with the next rain or wind.
Newly remastered films from 1971 to 1981 allow a fresh look at works that once existed mainly in grainy memory. Early paintings and drawings, rarely seen, sit alongside late sculptural pieces and restaged installations. Many of these have never been exhibited in the United Kingdom before. Specific pieces on display include the film Ochún from 1981, the Rupestrian Sculptures also from 1981, the video Parachute from 1973, Anima, Silueta de Cohetes from 1976, Bird Run from 1974, the photographs Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) from 1972, Nile Born from 1984, the sculpture La Jungla (Totem Grove) from 1985 and Ñañigo Burial from 1976.
My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art. I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.
So Mendieta herself once said. The remark feels quietly devastating in an age when so much art announces its politics before it has even earned the right to be looked at. Her practice spanned performance, film, photography, sculpture, drawing and installation, yet it never reduced itself to slogan. The earth-body works use ephemeral materials precisely because they refuse permanence. They accept their own disappearance. That acceptance now looks less like romantic gesture and more like wisdom.
The exhibition is co-curated by Michael Wellen, Valentine Umansky and Elsa Collinson of Tate Modern. It continues beyond the gallery walls, insisting that the relationship with the natural world is not decorative but foundational. Tate will also host a late opening on 25 September from 18:00 to 22:00 featuring music, workshops, talks and performances. These practical touches matter. They suggest an institution trying, for once, to let the work breathe rather than smother it with interpretation.
