The ttff is pleased to be presenting three works by Cuban born performance artist, Ana Mendieta. Ochún and Flower Person have been exhibited on a limited basis, and all three works were chosen as pieces that represent and tie Mendieta’s work to the Caribbean. Although she spent the majority of her life and artistic career in the USA, Mendieta’s work reflects a longing for her Caribbean ancestry and a reimagining of her return to her real and imagined homeland. Ochún is © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
(8mins) | Cuba, United States of America
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Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948. Much of Mendieta’s work expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement, and resonates with visceral metaphors of death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. In 1972 Mendieta began making ritualistic performances and haunting earth works, in which she immersed or inscribed her own body within nature. Blood, fire, water, and other natural elements are essential to her highly personal, often mystical vocabulary. Over a fourteen-year period Mendieta made more than seventy films and videotapes that document her powerful body-based performances and landscape sculptures.