Ana Mendieta. She Got Love

29 january 2013 - 16 june 2013

The project, curated by Beatrice Merz and Olga Gambari, aims to retrace the figure of the artist as a model and an icon for performance and video, body art and photography, land art, the portrait and sculpture. In Mendieta’s works (1948–1985) all these components merge as languages conjoined in an extremely personal alphabet, both visionary and material, magical and poetic, political and progressive to be used for describing the female identity, starting from her Cuban cultural roots to arrive at the contemporary woman. In her work, Mendieta explores themes as the individual existence, the genders, death and life, violence and love, sex, re-birth and uprooting always transcending them in a consistency that becomes spiritual. Her body camouflages into Nature, into a research of her personal and general origins, with a will of reunification to an eternal and universal cosmic energy into which the human, the natural and the divine component coexist. The conceptual and ideological horizon which revolves around the female figure, not as an end in itself, but as a lens through which life is observed, moves from a carnal physicality, kneaded into the earth and into nature, into the protoculture passing from everyday experience to rise up to the spirituality of existence. The recurrent distinctive sign into all her works is a typical feminine silhouette, an essential self-portrait realized in earth, mud, feather, flowers, leaves, ash, gunpowder, branches, shells, grass, ice, rock, wax, moss, sand, blood, water and fire.

Various places appear in Mendieta’s experience, from Cuba to the United States to Italy, points among which she had succeeded in weaving relationships and exchanges along alternative channels.

Each of her performances will be presented as a stage, a profound and enveloping environment described through video, sketches, photographs, any notes that create a moment of great emotional sharing on the part of the public, a mental but also physical entry into a place.

Published by Skira on the occasion of the large retrospective at Castello di Rivoli, the exhaustive catalog includes texts by the curators, a bio-bibliographical section and a wide selection of images.

All over the exhibition period will be projected a documentary upon the time the artist lived in Italy. The exhibition has been conceived in collaboration with the Ana Mendieta Estate.

The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the contribution of Fondazione Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT and the technical support of Kuhn & Bülow Insurance Broker, Berlin