Ana Mendieta. Traces

With Ana Mendieta. Traces, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg under the new director Sabine Breitwieser dedicated—for the first time in German-speaking countries—an extensive retrospective to the well-known American-Cuban artist and publishes the first German-language monograph.

Ana Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana in Cuba. At the age of twelve, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States to be raised in safety. She died in New York in 1985, at the age of thirty-six, in controversial circumstances. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by retrospectives in the United States and Europe and is represented in major museum collections. A comprehensive exhibition and German monograph on Ana Mendieta were long overdue in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria. With roughly 150 major works in diverse media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing, the exhibition presented a comprehensive overview of Mendieta’s work. A special section of the show featured the artist’s archive, slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards were specially prepared for the exhibition.

Ana Mendieta devoted her work to a search for her origins and identity. During her brief career—and likewise short life—the artist created a radical and original oeuvre in which her interest in the correlation of ritual and sculpture, body and nature became manifest. Using her own body in connection with elementary materials, such as blood, fire, earth, and water, she created “body prints,” and ephemeral “earth body”-sculptures. In these, Mendieta explored thematic complexes such as life and death, rebirth and spiritual transformation. The pain and rupture caused by cultural displacement and exile are clearly legible in several of her works. For example, the outline of the artist’s body is wiped away by black powder, fireworks, or water. Mendieta shaped depictions of ancient goddesses in the sand, scratches them into rocks, and draws them in clay or on leaves. While the artistic media that Mendieta used in her works could not be any more diverse. The images that she produced are characterized by a distinctive, overwhelming, and mystical poetics. The exhibition has been organized by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in cooperation with the Hayward Gallery, London.

On March 29, 2014, the museum hosted a symposium with presentations by MdMS-director Sabine Breitwieser; Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery, London; Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, University of Roehampton, London; Eva Badura-Triska, Curator, mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.